A senior US intelligence official has said that the intelligence leaker Edward Snowden has caused the United States profound damage through his revelations of how America's National Security Agency has spied not just on its own citizens, but on friends and allies around the world. Unfortunately, when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, giving evidence at a US Senate hearing, roundly condemned Snowden's revelations, many observers may have felt that he sounded like a robber protesting the unmasking of his crimes. It was the original act of deciding to snoop on US friends, as well as US foes, that caused the profound damage. Snowden merely blew the whistle on a program that was at best ill-conceived and at worst downright criminal. But rather than address the stupidity of their actions, America's intelligence community has chosen to go after the man who unmasked them. The US intelligence services, largely through the immense technological resources of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, are sucking up millions of phone calls and texts every day and have targeted the personal phones of world leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The billions of dollars that Washington has invested in its signals intelligence systems in this barely credible accumulation of massive amounts of data, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, was largely underpinned by George W. Bush's global war on terror following the enormity of 9/11. But the horror of what happened that day is rarely put into any context other than the livid wound Americans still carry in memory of the most deadly outside assault ever launched upon the US homeland. Just under 3,000 people died in the 9/11 attacks. That same year, more than ten times as many people, 32,788 to be exact, almost all of them Americans, died on US roads. Undeniably, they perished singly or in small groups in a series of wrecks all over the country throughout the year. There was nothing as spectacular about their horrors to match the hijacking of four airliners on 9/11. Yet the headline figures are surely significant and can be taken further. The total death toll, worldwide, caused by direct action by Al-Qaeda terrorists, even including the now daily carnage in Iraq from their car bombs, is still a fraction of the number of Americans who die in wrecks on US highways. Yet the amount of money that Washington has devoted to improved transport infrastructure, to better driving and to safer roads, is infinitesimal compared with the billions that have been poured into the US intelligence machine and into its signal intelligence in particular. Without doubt America and its allies face well-developed cyber-threats from China and Russia. But the spy chiefs have used the “war on terror” as an excuse to create a vast unauthorized intelligence gathering network which spies on its own people as well as its friends and allies abroad. A monster seems to have been unleashed behind the phony cover of the anti-terrorist campaign. Obama has apologized to Merkel and other foreign politicians whose personal communications were spied on. He has also promised to tighten up the rules under which the electronic snoopers operate. The NSA, however, is almost bound to merely pay lip service to the new rules and carry on as before. The biggest change it will make will be a far more careful vetting of those who work on these illegal programs to try and ensure that another Edward Snowden does not get to find out about them.
