The Great Comedian once said this: “Gentleman, you can’t fight in here…this is the War Room,” the absurdity crystallizing everything within shouting distance. The modern equivalent might be this: “We know that you’re spying on us, because our spies told us.”
In the wake of the NSA leaks by Edward Snowden, a man so outraged by surveillance that he relocated to Russia, few people in this country or any country have dealt with our new reality very honestly. Everyone is spying on everyone, from individuals to corporations to governments. It’s only going to grow more prevalent. And if everybody is guilty, nobody is guilty.
Within a week of French President François Hollande deriding the U.S. for spying, Le Monde printed an expose implicating France for similar behavior. From Steve Erlanger in the New York Times:
“PARIS — Days after President François Hollande sternly told the United States to stop spying on its allies, the newspaper Le Monde disclosed on Thursday that France has its own large program of data collection, which sweeps up nearly all the data transmissions, including telephone calls, e-mails and social media activity, that come in and out of France.
Le Monde reported that the General Directorate for External Security does the same kind of data collection as the American National Security Agency and the British GCHQ, but does so without clear legal authority.
The system is run with ‘complete discretion, at the margins of legality and outside all serious control,’ the newspaper said, describing it as ‘a-legal.’
Nonetheless, the French data is available to the various police and security agencies of France, the newspaper reported, and the data is stored for an indeterminate period. The main interest of the agency, the paper said, is to trace who is talking to whom, when and from where and for how long, rather than in listening in to random conversations. But the French also record data from large American networks like Google and Facebook, the newspaper said.”