President Barack Obama’s efforts in foreign affairs could suffer body blows if NSA snooping on America and the world continues unchanged. The US may find fewer sympathizers of its foreign policies, almost none of which can be implemented without the support of friends and allies.
US leadership of the international community stems from the trust of the majority of nations about the benign nature of US foreign policy. Most believe that America’s heart is in the right place even when some feel outraged by its actions. That trust is the most important enabler of US foreign policy. It is now being undermined.
Obama’s firm defense of the snooping tells foreign governments, companies and people that none of their data is safe from American spies when they do business with US corporations.
Within the US, American citizens may be protected against disclosure of the actual content of emails, online chats or telephone conversations but foreign citizens and companies using the services of US telecom and internet providers have almost no similar protections.
The great debate on the civil liberties American citizens agree to surrender to feel safe against terrorists matters little to foreigners. What does matter is whether working with US corporations is safe for them.
Corporations like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon have become world leaders because foreign governments, companies and internet users trust them to keep their data out of US government hands.
Now, suspicions about US government intentions could severely dent the willingness of friends and allies to deal with American companies or support US foreign policy. Germany and Europe have already reacted negatively to the snooping, as demonstrated by the coolness at last week’s G-8 Summit in Ireland and Obama’s state visit to Germany.
If fears are not allayed effectively, foreign governments may set up their own plans to establish giant server farms to protect their country’s data instead of using the internet hubs, pipelines, server farms, and service providers located in the US.
That would cripple America’s very lucrative dominance of the Internet and the global expansion plans of major US corporations, including Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and others. Currently, the vast majority of the world’s email, chat lines and web sites, particularly those in lucrative Asian markets, are handled by US-based providers and web hosts.
Now, America’s foreign friends know that the snooping goes far beyond trying to catch terrorists. It amounts to industrial espionage of major European and Asian companies through data gathered from internet and telecom service providers. Even foreign telecom companies like Orange of France and Swisscom of Switzerland can be compelled to transfer data to the FBI, if they use services from US-based providers.
Major companies like Novartis (life sciences) and ABB (engineering) located in neutral Switzerland are potentially open to industrial espionage if they use encrypted enterprise-wide email systems developed by Google and other American providers. At least 100 of Europe’s biggest companies use such email and cloud computing systems. Many more around the world use them. All are vulnerable to data gathering by the FBI, NSA and others, acting under procedures legal in the US but illegal in their own countries.
The signals to competitors and potential foes are still more negative. The billions of Chinese emails and data obtained by the NSA, as alleged by Snowdon, demonstrate that the espionage goes well beyond anti-terrorism or spying on China’s government and military. The data may include proprietary corporate emails and conversations among Chinese citizens.
For China, this is a wakeup call. It already has the world’s largest telecom and internet providers, such as China Mobile, China Unicom, Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba. It also has proprietary server farms and Wi-Fi systems, which have regularly prompted American complaints that they are barriers to entry by US companies.
Yet, the NSA seems to have successfully gathered enormous data. The Chinese will surely batten down the hatches, increasing the potentially adverse consequences of cyber snooping and warfare.
Washington has often chastised Beijng for using secret systems to spy on its own citizens, block foreign internet providers to prevent freedom of expression, and blank out news that criticizes China. Beijing is accused of industrial cyber espionage and major Chinese companies like Huawei are prevented from supplying telecom equipment on the suspicion that it might contain components that will spy on Americans.
Now, Obama seems to say that the US will continue to use secret legal regulations and secret processes to obtain extensive data secretly about companies and people outside the US. Revelation of those processes is espionage against the US, as demonstrated by the espionage charges brought against Snowdon.
If unchanged, the message the world will receive is that each country must seek the capability to establish proprietary digital services without using American providers, including those incorporated locally because they still remain within the NSA and FBI grasp. That can’t be good for American service exports or foreign policy.