Relax, everybody—the U.S. is only spying on “foreigners,” said El Periódico de Catalunya (Spain) in an editorial. Of course, last we checked, that includes almost everyone in the world. Europeans are apoplectic over revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency—the massive and opaque spying authority that is even more secretive than the CIA—is vacuuming up everyone’s emails and phone records and sifting through them for hints about terrorist networks. The U.S. government is trying to soothe Americans’ concerns by assuring them that a special court must authorize any snooping that could touch on U.S. citizens’ data. Yet there’s no limit whatsoever on the use of foreigners’ data in this dragnet, codenamed PRISM. “These mass surveillance programs are an unacceptable violation of the private sphere, even if the U.S. Congress has given them its approval.”
This isn’t the first time the U.S. has spied on its allies without informing them, said Jean-Pierre Stroobants in Le Monde (France). In 2006, we learned that the CIA had been secretly gathering data from SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. It took four years after that for the EU and the U.S. to work out a treaty governing that information. It took even longer to agree on how the U.S. could use and store the data it was illegally collecting on European airline passengers. What seems to rankle EU leaders most about these latest, far graver revelations is that once again, “Brussels was in no way informed in advance.”
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