The novel 1984 by British writer George Orwell, published in 1949, predicted a scary dystopian future where Britain becomes known as Airstrip 1 and is in a permanent state of war, and the government snoops on people and tries to control their thoughts. In this future as well, there is a kind of a personality cult, with the ruling party led by Big Brother, and the ministry of information transformed into the Ministry of Truth. The well-known Watergate scandal started when members of Richard Nixon's campaign spied on a Democratic Party office in the Watergate building near the Potomac River in Washington in 1972, and ended with denials, lies, trials, and prison sentences, culminating with Nixon's resignation in 1974. What is in common between the novel and the scandal? Each one concerns a specific country, but today, I find in the United States a much bigger scandal, because it went beyond U.S. borders to affect the entire world. To be sure, the Obama administration did not stop at spying on enemies, foes, and rivals, but also snooped on its allies. As a result, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and many other countries have now protested and demanded an inquiry, while the European Union is calling for a meeting with the Americans before the end of the year to discuss the scandal. This is an earth-shattering scandal indeed. The eavesdropping spared no one. Just as the Americans spied on the private phone calls of Chancellor Angela Merkel, they also spied on the calls of American citizens and others. I read that the National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted in the first month of this year alone 124.8 billion mobile phone calls, including countries that concern the readers such as: Iraq 7.8 billion calls; Saudi Arabia 7.8 billion calls; Egypt 1.9 billion calls; Iran 1.7 billion calls; and Jordan 1.6 billion calls. Edward Snowden, who worked for the NSA, left with 30,000 confidential files, which he is leaking bit by bit. Last week, The Guardian published one such document revealing that the NSA spied on 35 out of 200 world leaders whose numbers a senior U.S. official had given to the NSA. I read after this that Snowden has documents that incriminate some U.S. allies, showing that their intelligence agencies cooperated with the U.S. intelligence in illegal activities against citizens from those countries. I also read that a U.S. court convicted a British youth for hacking into U.S. military agencies' computers, and wants Britain to extradite him. In other words, they spied on the whole world and yet demand one British citizen who perpetrated just one act out of the billion things they perpetrated. When I read about the United States these days, I feel like I am reading about a Third World country that oppresses its citizens. The Obama administration has even taken legal action against investigative journalists, including from The New York Times, Fox News, and others from the Associated Press. The administration wants to prevent reporters from pursuing the eavesdropping scandal, so I ask, would Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have succeeded in 1972 if the Nixon administration had the current administration's technological abilities to crack down on investigate reporters? The Americans have spied on Chancellor Merkel's phone, and I even read that it was President Barack Obama who authorized it. I then read that he was not aware of the eavesdropping on world leaders, and that there are U.S. documents showing that it was Israel that spied on President Francois Hollande's phone. It seems that Chancellor Merkel is naïve, and made eavesdropping on her phone easy, according to U.S. documents from 2002. I read that for four years, she used the same Nokia-brand phone, and did not switch to a smartphone like Blackberry until last July. What I fear after all the above is that the major powers would find a solution that safeguards each side's rights, only to focus on us after that because our rights are easily trampled. [email protected]
