I’m half-expecting that Snowden will be “disappeared” fairly soon. Probably with Russia’s help, or least its complacency. (Latest reports have him stuck in limbo at Moscow’s airport.)
That said, I’m not the slightest bit surprised that the US spies on its allies. All countries do this. Any outraged howls from European leaders are 100% phony.
And by disappeared, you mean what?
Spying on other countries might be normal, but bugging embassies of friendly nations?
Also, “the European Nation”…?
Yeah, that’s pretty normal, too.
Maybe German and France are all friendly now, but who knows when the German army decides to invade again for old times’ sake? That’s only a half-joke. Knowing what your friends are thinking can be just as important as knowing what your enemies are thinking.
The UK was bugging everybody at the last G20 summit in London, allies not excluded. But that ‘revelation’ has been getting significantly less traction because it’s more satisfying to express moral outrage at the US.
Everybody spies on everybody. It’s beyond naive to believe otherwise.
Why are you ridiculing the OP? The spying leak is getting quite a bit of press, and while people may not be shocked by the spying itself, its revelation certainly seems worthy of discussion.
The responses so far in this thread seem to fall in line with Secretary Kerry’s ham-handed response of “well, everybody does it, so…” He’s not exactly wrong, but it seems a bit tactless to put it that way.
Here’s an interesting twist: the U.S. government says it has had high-level talks with Russia about extraditing Snowden, and Putin is apparently saying that if Snowden wants to stay in Russia he needs to stop leaking secrets. Not that I’d necessarily take that at face value.
What else is there to discuss? Yes, it’s in the press and you rarely see this kind of thing confirmed, but it’s not a surprise.
Should he lie, or should we all just pretend it’s not true because it doesn’t sound nice?
What else is he supposed to say? “We’re sorry and we won’t do it again”? “My bad”? “If you would just tell us all this shit we wouldn’t have to bother”?
It’s true. Every country - including friendly countries - spies on every other country. It’s called diplomacy.
Well, to be fair, diplomacy is really the polite fiction that it’s not happening.
The OP asked this question: “Could this have serious repercussions for America’s relationship with her closest allies?” Feel free to discuss it or not. But don’t come into the thread just to imply the OP is naive, or call him a child, as some other posters have done.
I should probably stop backseat moderating though.
I’m actually not sure what the standard response is to leaked evidence you’ve spied on your allies. Maybe Kerry followed the script perfectly. It just seemed graceless given the US’s recent “we can spy on whomever the fuck we want” public image, and because it was directed at our allies. But IANADiplomat.
Again, taking the UK response, it didn’t make one (to the press, anyway). If John Kerry made no response, rather than a weak one, he’d be vilified for it. Maybe not by you but certainly by somebody. You can’t win for trying.
You should also realize that responses given to the press are going to be different from what goes on behind closed doors. Kerry’s response is for the press, not for our allies.
We’re not seeing diplomacy before our eyes. We are limited to what is shown to the press, which is not remotely close to the discussions high end officials have between themselves.
It’s kind of an odd reaction, actually. You are requesting, on behalf of these governments, a better response while having almost no knowledge of the official diplomatic response they received.
Meaning this. This is exactly the sort of situation where The Powers That Be might decide to do such a thing. If you assasinate him, he becomes a martyr. If you arrest him, it will multiply the media frenzy, and ensure that said frenzy continues for years to come. Letting him go is right out. That leaves the option of making sure that he doesn’t make the news any longer, and waiting for the media’s notoriously short attention to wander elsewhere.
I’m familiar with the idea of disappearing people. I am asking what you think might be done to this guy, by whom, and why.
Which Powers are you referring to? The U.S. has already charged him with espionage and has made it clear they want to extradite him to put him on trial, so I’m not seeing why it would choose to do that. It doesn’t serve any particular purpose for Russia either. I assume they could get something in return for forking him over, but not for keeping him somewhere forever. That wouldn’t look very good for the U.S. either. Ecuador doesn’t seem all that interested in getting involved here.
Eh, not really. And if you’re convinced that he’s done the wrong thing and needs to go to jail as a punishment or a deterrent, you’re not really worried about the media frenzy anyway. Media frenzies often seem endless but they never are.
How precisely does one “disappear” a man who is now internationally famous and is being watched by journalists worldwide? Tinpot dictatorships in South America were able to make people disappear because they controlled the media. If Ed Snowden just vanished off the face of the Earth one night, you can bet your bottom dollar the press would take notice, and “Why, he simply disappeared, now let’s have no more discussion of this bizarre coverup” wouldn’t suffice to stop their inquiry.
Can you name any other high profile embarrassments to the United States that have been disappeared lately? If bringing shame on the United States was enough to get you whisked off to a black site, then why is Donald Trump walking around a free man?
“Mr. Snowden caught his connecting flight” would be the new “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes,” I guess. No, the idea makes no sense. Meanwhile, though, Ecuador says they didn’t mean to help him get out of Hong Kong and the temporary travel documents he received were issued by mistake. So they’re not interested in helping him either. I guess he’ll tell the Russians something interesting and/or be turned over to the U.S. eventually.
No they’re not.
But, but.. they spy on us!!
I’d doubt the ‘everyone does it’ assumption. There is a political price for espionage on a close ally that can be traced back to the responsible party (I assume, for example, that the cost of Jonathan Pollard to Israel’s political capital in the US outweighed the benefit of his intelligence).
There is a degree of intelligence gathering on allies that is generally accepted - e.g. the Wikileaks cables showed that US diplomats forwarded information from background talks with a lot of German political figures, including minor aides. One got fired for particularly disrespectful comments, but the diplomats who talked with him did not get blamed; it was considered their business.
What would be total idiocy on the part e.g. of German intelligence would be to bug US officials - as the US apparently has done of German and other European officials. German public opinion at present is infuriated because (a) everyone’s privacy has been compromised and (b) the US government stated that widespread surveillance was necessary to foil terrorist plots, and now it seems that European governments have been spied on.
The trans-atlantic relationship has taken a major hit in the public consciousness here - we sent German soldiers to Afghanistan to die in a mission that most agree does no lasting good there (the common assumption is that we just pay our alliance dues, not benefitting Afghanistan), and now we know the US does not regard us as an ally but a ‘third party’ (quote from a presentation made available by Snowden - the political impact is amplified by the term ‘third party’ having been mistranslated as Partner dritter Klasse (third-class partner)).
The thought of many people liking the US here in Germany is: “We thought you considered us allies”.
Apart from the morality if the thing, isn’t it dilettantism of the highest order to convey such policies in presentations that are accessible by a contractor, for God’s sake?
That seems to be a common flavour of conversation in the UK as well. It isn’t so much that we get spied on. (Rest assured the UK is doing it to everyone else as much as possible). It is more the fact that what the USA did seems so…amateur and shoddy, with pisspoor powerpoints to boot. The only thing missing is the use of comic-sans and once that shoe drops…whoa!
And now you know how they really view you.
For Americans, not everebody is created equal.
Germany and the UK aren’t allies, you’re auxiliaries.