As another spy scandal involving the U.S. National Security Agency bristles over Europe, one wonders why everybody keeps rubbing up to the snoops at Fort Meade, Maryland. The truth is simple: The United States has for decades put its money where its mouth is. The Americans invested big in intelligence gathering. It is high time others do the same.
"If you're good at something, never do it for free." So said The Joker in the movie The Dark Knight, in response to gangsters who had asked him why he had not already killed Batman.
The Joker's motto could well be that of any country's intelligence agency, as we witnessed again last week in the spy scandal that has electrified German politics. German magazine Der Spiegel reported that the the country's intelligence organization, the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst), and the German government have for years allegedly helped the United States spy on German companies - and even on European politicians and institutions.
The revelations sparked outrage both in Germany and outside the country. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel is directly responsible for the BND. Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, Merkel's coalition partner but a political rival, lashed out publicly at Merkel. Meanwhile, the German national prosecutor's office is seriously considering an investigation that may well prove a political threat to the still-popular Merkel.
Why would Merkel condone the snooping on German companies and politicians, as the media reports convincingly allege? Merkel herself hails from East Germany, the former communist German Democratic Republic, where the spooks of the Stasi spy agency eavesdropped on hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens. So why would the chancellor, of all people, keep silent on the troubling alliance between the NSA and the BND?
The fact is that the NSA does such a great job snooping that allied agencies go to great lengths to stay connected to its impressive data repository. No other country over the past 50 years has spent as much on signal intelligence gathering as has the United States. In the post-9/11 environment, the simple truth is that the free world cannot do without the NSA.
Spyworld lives by the quid pro quo. If you cannot give the NSA something they need or value, then you move to the back of the queue at its data shop - if you remain in line at all. Spy bosses everywhere know this.
Take the Netherlands, for instance. Despite an edgy political scandal that erupted in 2014 because of alleged illegal data sharing between its national agency, the AIVD, and the NSA, the government recently proposed expanding the AIVD's digital eavesdropping capabilities. And just last week, France's National Assembly granted its spy agencies the most far-reaching snooping capabilities in the nation's history. It is no accident that one of the provisions in the proposed Dutch law and the new French one are about allowing agencies to collect metadata in bulk.
As far as this writer knows, there is only one organization in the world that has the hardware to crunch all that raw data: the NSA. Because of this, the recent spy scandals involving the NSA and allied intelligence agencies are certain not to be the last.
This may change when European nations get serious about setting up their own variants of the NSA. The idea of the European Union's own version of the NSA is sometimes dusted off at dinner tables in Brussels, but the fact that no government has yet been willing to defer powers of its own intelligence agency to another governing institution probably shows the validity of another truism in spyland: All that friendly allied cooperation is just window dressing.
If you're good at something, never do it for free.
(AP photo)