Europe is complicit in spying

It’s not just the Americans who have developed a gigantic spying apparatus.

Europeans could hardly be more disappointed in Barack Obama, said Gérald Papy in Le Vif (Belgium). We welcomed his election, thinking he would be “like a big brother—only to find he is actually the face of Big Brother.” NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden has opened our eyes to the extent of U.S. spying on European communications, and the entire Continent is aghast. Our emails, phone calls, and social media usage are all logged. “Can we simply accept, without reacting, that private companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Facebook become—whether coerced or voluntarily—the armed wing of a rogue state?”

Ah, but it’s not just the Americans, said Le Monde (France) in an editorial. France, too, has “developed a gigantic apparatus to spy on all of its citizens and beyond.” And our program is, in some respects, worse than the U.S. one because ours “skirts the edges of legality.” Everything is available to any of the government’s eight intelligence bodies. And unlike in the U.S., there’s not even the fig leaf of a check or balance: None of the data collection is overseen by the judiciary or legislature. Our democracy “has in its possession an instrument of totalitarian control.” That makes the French denunciation of Obama sound rather hypocritical.

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