Since Spain’s El Mundo published reports that the National Security Agency had monitored the phone calls of over 60 million of the nation’s citizens, and that its prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, was one of the 36 heads of state spied upon by the agency, Spain’s newspapers have been publishing editorials and op-eds about the situation. Here are three, translated by the people of Worldmeets.US:
First up, what rights do the citizens of other countries being monitored by the NSA deserve? This editorial from El Pais headlined Mass U.S. Monitoring of Innocent Non-Americans Must End questions the need for the agency to invade the privacy of millions of innocent people in Spain, Europe, and the rest of the world.
“However much it is claimed that this surveillance is carried out with judicial authorization under the controversial Patriot Act, it is hard to accept that the fight against terrorism justifies a need to monitor the communications of millions of citizens in other countries. A basic sense of proportionality makes it implausible that in a hypothetical search for terrorist cells, the intelligence services were involved with monitoring the computers of important people such as the presidents of Mexico and Brazil, or French diplomatic missions in Washington and the United Nations.”
Second, in another editorial headlined Conflicted Europe Must Defend Citizen Liberties, El Pais points out that being dependent on U.S. intelligence, while at the same time needing to defend against it, puts Europe in a pickle. Nevertheless, El Pais suggests that whatever else European leaders do – or don’t do – in response to the NSA’s mass monitoring, they much ensure that the freedom of Europeans is not infringed upon.
“Europe is caught between the dilemma of preserving transatlantic relations and containing espionage against its own interests. … E.U. countries need the protective shield of the American intelligence services, with which they closely collaborate – a fact that checks any desire to retaliate and cushions the crisis of confidence. … European governments would do well to investigate their own weaknesses and loopholes in guarding sensitive information, and to ensure, to the limits of their capabilities, that the liberties of their citizens don’t become a dead letter.”
Finally, what of value might the NSA glean from tapping the cell phone of Spain Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy? Not very much, writes columnist Manuel Rivas, who suggests in an article headlined Rather than Rajoy’s Phone Calls, NSA Should Focus on JFK’s Assassin!, that the agency would be better off focusing its attentions closer to home, or at least on something relevant to the United States:
“We shall see just how right the author of 1984 was, now that the All-Hearing Ear has become interested in Merkel’s cell phone and even conversations of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. … The most fascinating thing for the NSA has to have been eavesdropping on Rajoy’s cell phone. Those endless silences – with punctuation marks and spelling mistakes that not even the most experienced spy could decipher. All told, the NSA would be better off focusing its efforts at home to see, at long last, who in the hell killed Kennedy.”
READ MORE TRANSLATED and English-language foreign press coverage as the NSA surveillance scandal continues to unfold at Worldmeets.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.
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