America Must Come to the Table on Surveillance (People's Daily,
China)
Would it be wise for Washington to look beyond the moment and
realize that the technology it is using for the mass surveillance of other
peoples and governments will soon be turned against it by those very same peoples
and governments? For China's state-run People's
Daily, Dr. ShenDingli,dean of international studies Fudan University, calls U.S. surveillance beyond the pale
for even the closest U.S. allies, and advises Washington to help create global
norms while it still has a strong hand to play.
By ShenDingli*
Translated By
John Chen
August 20, 2013
David Miranda, partner of investigative reporter Glenn Greenwald, after being released by British agents. His detention appears to have brought to a head a titanic battle between the Fourth Estate and the national security state: one, desperate to show the truth of government misdeeds, and the other, intent on protecting a combinatioin of itself and the nations they are sworn to protect.
Edward
Snowdon revealed large-scale U.S. monitoring of cyberspace and telecommunications,
both home and abroad, confirming many previous assumptions. Nevertheless, the breadth
and depth of the monitoring has deeply shocked the world.
President
Obama recently spoke in response to the plethora of questions put to the United
States on the issue, and offered four U.S. intelligence reform measures, saying
these would adjust laws to strengthen checks and balances on government power,
increase the transparency of surveillance, and establish a panel of experts to
review the technology available to the U.S. for data surveillance.
Obama
hopes to blur the line between counter-terrorism and civil rights in order to
create the impression that he is meeting the need for national security while
also protecting privacy, thus bringing to a conclusion the debate triggered by
Snowden's revelations over a month ago. While the U.S. government's capacity to
do this remains to be seen, most of Obama's past promises have proven empty.
Moreover, given the special nature of intelligence work, it will be exceedingly
hard for average Americans to verify that such assurances about intelligence transparency
have in fact been met.
In
any case, regardless of the measures President Obama chooses to adopt, two
things will remain unchanged: while it seeks to allay the concerns of Americans
on domestic monitoring, the U.S. government will not interrupt its mass
surveillance of other countries or its infringement of their information sovereignty.
While the Obama government intends to bring things more into balance
domestically, it is evident that it has no intention of redressing the balance
between its own interests and those of other nations.
The
United States has no inherent right to monitor the sovereign territory of other
nations, whether in regard to physical structures or private data. The United
States is entitled to maintain the sovereignty of its own networks as far as its
own self defense is concerned, but it has no right to infringe on the security
of the global network for inappropriate or preemptive purposes.
Countries
around the world are concerned about the extent to which the information
frontier has been invaded by the United States. Given the non-physical nature
of cyberspace, drawing up the boundaries of national sovereignty and implementing
effective defenses still sits beyond the capacity of human security. Even so, the
United States does not have the privilege to infiltrate sovereign territory for
the purposes of surveillance and theft.
On
the one hand, the United States demands that other nations refrain from
carrying out cyberattacks by citing its right to protect national security and intellectual
property. On the other, it ignores the sovereign rights of other countries by
attacking their networks to gain access to information on their national
security and intellectual property. This is a serious violation of the legitimate
security and economic interests of other nations. Recent revelations demonstrate
that the actions of the United States have strayed far beyond any of the
demands of counter-terrorism, and into the realm of industrial espionage for
the purposes of obtaining access to the technological development strategies of
other sovereign powers.
America's
surveillance programs could not have remained hidden forever. Such blatant self
interest could never have been deemed acceptable by even the U.S. government's
own employees. The Snowdon revelations were no
accident, and other agents would have exposed the secret if he had not. The
scale of the infringement of the rights and interests of other countries which
has now been exposed is far beyond what even America's partner countries can
tolerate and accept.
The
United States cannot use national security as a pretext for its own network
attacks on other nations, while at the same time maintaining its position as
self-appointed moral policeman for the rest of the world. More importantly,
with rapid globalization, the advanced science and technology that is now the
sole preserve of the United States is spreading rapidly, and network attacks will
no longer be a weapon to which the U.S. has exclusive access. This could soon
put America in a very delicate position.
Just
as the United States was once the sole master of biological and chemical
weapons, with the rapid proliferation of these arms, United States eventually
had to promote global norms for giving them up in the interest of a biological
and chemical weapons-free world. The United States should draw the proper
conclusions.
*ShenDingli is professor and
associate dean of international studies, Fudan
University
