Are European leaders, and the leaders of Brazil, Mexico and others, angry about the morality of NSA mass surveillance, or is there something else sticking under their collective craw? For Poland’s Rzeczpospolita, columnist Bartosz Weglarczyk ‘guarantees’ to his readers that the only thing bothering them is that the NSA has so outstripped the capabilities of their own intelligence services.
For Rzeczpospolita, columnist Bartosz Weglarczyk starts out this way:
In every nation, the task of the intelligence services is to obtain information about other countries in a way that violates the laws of those countries. This is an obvious verity that has been forgotten by European politicians shaking with indignation after the most recent revelations based on the leaks of NSA fugitive Edward Snowden.
Legally acquiring information is the task of journalists and diplomats. They read newspapers, meet with people, listen, and then analyze the information. Intelligence service officers are the people who break the law – they are to use all means possible to obtain – to buy or steal – information held in secret by another country’s government.
In 1929, the U.S. secretary of state of the time, Henry L. Stimson, closed America’s then tiny intelligence agency, saying that “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” Since that time , however, the world has changed, and today it is difficult to function diplomatically without such “mail reading.”
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