Collateral victims

The massive espionage practiced by the US security agency NSA, and revealed by Edward Snowden, is putting a basic democratic liberty in jeopardy: the freedom of the press. Oddly enough, the hounding of the free press is taking place not in the USA but on the other side of the Atlantic, where it is open season on shooting the messenger.

The pressure that the rival press, the political parties, the intelligence services and David Cameron's British government are putting on The Guardian, the newspaper that published Snowden's documents, is unheard of, as demonstrated by the hostile interrogation to which the newspaper's editor, Alan Rusbridger, was subjected in the Home Affairs Select Committee of the House of Commons. One Labour member had no qualms about asking him the question: "Do you love this country?"

The freedom of the press is one collateral victim, and not the least of them, in a scandal whose details keep emerging, painting a picture of the NSA's almost obsessive concern with the indiscriminate collection of data which — to mention the most picturesque examples — included the trawling of online games such as World of Warcraft and Second Life.

This interference in privacy in the name of the struggle against terrorism —- keep in mind that Washington has intercepted the messages of as many as 35 world leaders — is alarming, and the complaints that first came from the European Union have now been added to by the voices of 562 intellectuals and writers throughout the world, calling on the United Nations for some sort of international law to protect civil rights in the digital era.

President Obama has promised a revision of the mass espionage system, but the credibility of his pledge is very much up in the air as long as the secret court of judges designated by the Department of Justice — which almost automatically authorizes the trawl demands submitted to it by the NSA — is still in existence.

Something has to be done about these indefensible methods, which are also taking a toll in terms of credibility from the big American digital firms that collaborate with the system. The distrust generated by such extensive trawling has caused users to shrink from these firms, and companies such as Google, Apple and Facebook are apprehensive of multi-million-dollar losses.

For reasons quite different in nature, but identical in results, the companies have called on Obama to set limits on the espionage. The reasons for doing so are numerous.