(c) REUTERS/Nacho Doce

The United States may yet become a major power in the world of international soccer.

Not on the field, of course – though the American team performed respectably in the 2014 World Cup, it cannot yet be called a threat to Brazil or Germany. Instead, the United States has done something seemingly impossible: it has taken steps to curb corruption at FIFA, the international organization responsible for governing worldwide soccer competitions.

FIFA is perhaps more famous for its questionable business practices than any role it plays in the sport itself. After it selected Russia and Qatar to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups despite the latter’s completely unsuitable environment and the former’s completely unsuitable government, accusations were made that the organization had accepted bribes from its would-be hosts – The Sunday Times reported two executive committee members offering to sell their votes to Qatar for $1.5 million, and Lord David Triesman, head of the British bid team competing with Russia, said that one committee member even asked to be knighted. The US Justice Department’s 47-count indictment of FIFA includes charges of racketeering, bribery, money laundering, and fraud.

What’s more interesting, though, is how the American investigation was carried out: while FIFA is headquartered in Zurich, it had ties to regional organizations in the Western hemisphere, and a great deal of its money passed through US banks. These international connections allowed the Justice Department to take action, and it did so in cooperation with Swiss authorities, who apparently seized electronic data from the organization’s headquarters to be used in their own parallel investigation. It seems likely that a significant amount of intelligence was shared between different organizations, some across international borders.

This sort of successful cooperation could use a little more fanfare. Since Edward Snowden’s June 2013 revelations about the American National Security Agency’s activities in Europe, much of the discussion about electronic intelligence collection has centered around its undesirability: it’s a tendril of the American empire in Europe, one that occasionally even reaches into the German chancellor’s pocket. The recent scandal in which the German intelligence agency – the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND – was shown to have worked with the American intelligence agencies for some time now proved that the impulse to snoop is not isolated to the US, but did little to improve opinion of the practice in general.

Intelligence sharing and robust data collection capabilities do, however, warrant a broader debate. Whether fighting FIFA or the Islamic State, the ability of security agencies to gather and compare data from a variety of sources will play a prominent role in the future of defense – as it must. It’s the responsibility of the public to discuss the appropriate limitations of that ability in a more nuanced way, one that acknowledges the benefits and costs of both security and privacy.

Efficient intelligence sharing isn’t necessarily a bad thing, or even one counter to the values of liberal democracy: it’s also the most effective tool in combating extremism and differentiating the truly dangerous groups from the merely ambitious. (Germany’s recent experience with the rightwing National Socialist Underground extremist group testifies to that.) And in fact, there’s significant evidence that publics on both sides of the Atlantic support this sort of activity when it’s specifically targeted. The German Marshall Fund’s Transatlantic Trends survey found, in September 2013, that 70 percent of Germans and slim majorities in Sweden, France, and the United States opposed their government “collecting the telephone and internet data of its citizens as part of the effort to protect national security”, and a Pew poll carried out in July 2014 echoed these results, with overwhelming majorities in Europe opposed to “monitoring communications, such as emails and phone calls, in the US and many other countries.” However, when Pew asked in the same poll about monitoring the communication of “individuals suspected of terrorist activities,” large majorities on both sides of the Atlantic were actually in favor – even in Germany.

Data collection and dissemination will need to be a part of security planning for the foreseeable future. It’s essential that transatlantic community discuss how exactly it should function and what its limits should be – along with what we want it to achieve.

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(c) REUTERS/Michaela Rehle

While the Bundestag is wrestling with the implications of the most recent spy scandal, the ex-Communist Left Party (Die Linke) has access to the secrets of Germany’s three intelligence agencies: the domestic intelligence service (Verfassungsschutz), whose spying on Germans until recently focused also on Left Party parliamentarians; the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD); and the foreign intelligence agency (BND).

Now the Left Party’s André Hahn, chair of the PCC, has been indirectly accused of leaking secret documents to the media. In return, he has hinted that the documents were leaked directly by the agencies themselves and that his oversight committee had not even seen them. Welcome to a country where questions of national security are routinely used as ammunition in political squabbles. Welcome to a political class that still cannot understand why American and British intelligence services might deem it necessary to spy on them now and again, if only to find out who is telling what to whom.

The most disturbing aspect is: the Germans consider NSA spying or the cooperation between it and the BND scandalous, but not the fact that confidential information has been leaked. Nor did anyone cry foul when Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, in fact, used leaked intelligence material to lay a trap for Chancellor Angela Merkel: It appears that back in 2006, America’s National Security Agency (NSA) asked the BND to check out two European companies, EADS (now Airbus) and its subsidiary Eurocopter. Nobody knows what the NSA was looking for – possibly attempts to subvert the sanctions against Iran. But Gabriel – who is also economics minister – lost no time in describing this as “industrial espionage.” He went on to say that Merkel had “assured” him twice that these were the only two “German” companies (they are, in fact, multinational) that had been spied on by the BND.

This seems unlikely. German companies have a sorry record of dealings with unsavory regimes, from the Mullahs’ Tehran to Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad to Putin’s Moscow. If any more companies turn up (and, given the porous nature of the spy agencies, that could happen at any time), Merkel will stand accused of lying.

It was, of course, no accident that Gabriel, a member of the SPD, chose to unleash his revelations a week before elections in Bremen, where his party stood to lose votes to Merkel’s CDU. But German media patted Gabriel on the back for his indiscretion, because he had found a chink in the iron chancellor’s armor. Nobody questioned his use of the term “industrial espionage” or the wisdom of using secret intelligence material to score points.

Admittedly, Merkel was asking for it. When in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s revelations it became clear that the NSA and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters were spying on German politicians – even tapping Merkel’s cell phone – the chancellor publicly declared that “friends don’t spy on friends.” This was a stupid thing to say, as she must have known better. Shortly afterwards it turned out that the BND had tapped US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s cell phone – but only “inadvertently,” according to the official explanation. Yeah, right.

Meanwhile, Merkel convened a meeting of Germany’s European partners to agree on a “No-Spy Treaty,” under which EU members – “friends” – would not spy on one another. This PR exercise – shortly before the last general election, incidentally – was a dig at the British, who of course were not going to sign any such agreement. All the while, however, the BND was spying on hundreds, possibly thousands of European Union institutions and officials at the behest of their friends at the NSA.

A No-Spy Treaty is an inherently absurd proposition, as is the idea of “friendship” between nations. A husband might swear never to read his wife’s diary, but when jealousy strikes, his wife had better be sure her diary is well hidden. In the harsh world of international relations, you want to be sure that what your “friends” are telling you to your face is what they are saying behind closed doors. Trust, but verify.

Merkel could have said just that. She did not. She could have pointed out that the cooperation between the BND and the NSA is a valued part of our “friendship” with the US. She did not. She could have stated that it is illegal for the BND to spy on German citizens at home, and that there is no evidence that the BND did that – and, in fact, there is a lot of evidence that the BND routinely refused such requests by the NSA. She did not. She could have explained that it is not illegal to spy on European institutions and businesses and why such espionage might be necessary. She did not. Instead, she tried to ride the tiger of German anger at the Americans and the “scandal” of cooperation with them; now, though the tiger will not eat her, it just might bite her. Serves her right.

In discussions with American and British visitors, Germans like to point to the Nazi or Stasi past to explain their sensitivity when it comes to data collection. Nonsense. Every German regularly surrenders more information to the tax authorities and state Registration Office than a British or American person would deem acceptable. The Verfassungsschutz is the only spy agency in a Western democracy dedicated not only to tracking down real and present dangers to the state, but also to documenting “dangerous thoughts,” including those of Parliamentarians.

The problem with Germany is that part of its political class is politically immature. There is no discussion of concepts such as the national interest; the idea that there is not only a duty to control the security agencies but also to protect them is alien to most people. This is, potentially, much more dangerous than the possibility that the BND might have overstepped its remit now and then.

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(c) REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

In the proud tradition of Casablanca’s crooked police chief Captain Renault, Chancellor Angela Merkel said in 2013 that she was shocked, shocked, to learn from Edward Snowden that the NSA was spying on European companies, EU institutions, and even on her own mobile phone. Spying on friends, she said gravely, is just not on.

Last week the more world-weary among us in Berlin learned what we already suspected: spying on friends is most certainly on. And when it comes to US-German relationship you might even say: that’s what friends are for.

After a nearly banana-skin-free decade in power, Merkel is braced for the worst after claims that NSA surveillance in Europe was either enabled by or outsourced to Germany’s foreign intelligence service. The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) is accused of processing over 40,000 requests from the NSA to spy on people, businesses, and institutions in Europe. Among the reported targets: German companies, the EADS aerospace consortium, and even French government officials.

Starting in 2002 – on the basis of a new “memorandum of understanding” between both agencies following the 9/11 attacks – the NSA sent surveillance requests to the BND with targets identified by so-called “selectors” – email address, telephone number or the unique IP address of a computer’s internet connection. These targets were then observed by the BND via its listening post in Bad Aibling, south of Munich, and the collected data forwarded to the NSA.

It is unclear how many such “selectors” were filed by the NSA, though estimates range from several hundred thousand to more than a million. Seven years ago BND employees noted thousands of these computer-automated requests did not come under the terms of the agreement with the NSA. What happened next is still unclear. The BND says it quietly filtered out the illegal search requests, didn’t tell the NSA but reported the agency’s growing interests to the chancellery in 2008 and 2013.

A subsequent search turned up 2,000 problematic NSA requests but the chancellery denies it knew anything until it was told. Merkel spokesman Steffen Seibert has stuck to a script that the chancellery subsequently asked the BND to remedy without delay “technical and organizational deficits” identified at the intelligence agency. What these “deficits” are, no one wants to say. Two years after it was informed, the chancellery says it needs more time to investigate.

News of the alleged BND activity has caused uproar at an ongoing NSA Bundestag inquiry, with its chairman Patrick Sensburg from Merkel’s own ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU) expressing amazement that “no-one drew a line and said: ‘This isn’t okay.’”

The committee is sorting through testimony collected so far from the BND and the chancellery. Such as the insistence that the BND-NSA co-operation represented a “know-how gain” for the German spies involving “no activity against German interests.” Or the interior ministry’s response to a query from the Left Party on April 14, denying that it had any knowledge of NSA economic espionage. That could come back to haunt the government because the BND says it told the chancellery of the NSA’s repeated attempts to collect information on European companies a month earlier.

Interior minister Thomas de Maiziere – formerly the chancellery’s chief-of-staff – has denied the BND-NSA co-operation was illegal. Government sources insist the NSA has a legitimate interest in European companies that it suspected of trying to get around trading sanctions.

But what of the alleged spying on French officials? Berlin’s scandal-starved opposition senses blood in the water. “The chancellery is the supervising body of the BND,” said Gregor Gysi, Bundestag leader of the opposition Linke. “Either they didn’t know, and their supervision was useless, or they knew, and they involved themselves in illegal actions.”

The Linke and the Greens say that, even before all details are known, the revelations indicate how Berlin’s outrage after Snowden’s NSA allegations was a show put on by German officials anxious not to cross the US and risk exclusion from intelligence alliances. If the scandal continues to build in this fashion, Angela Merkel has the choice of two dents to her credibility: admit she didn’t know what her intelligence agency was telling her office about the NSA, or concede that her reaction to US spying was, as many suspected all along, just a holier-than-thou pantomime.

The question Germans want answered: because their intelligence agency couldn’t beat the NSA did it join it – with Berlin’s blessing?

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