Today, President Obama gave his
much-anticipated speech on NSA reforms.
Unsurprisingly, Obama mentioned the
spying on foreign leaders.
From the
speech:
Let me now turn to the separate set of concerns that have been
raised overseas and focus on America’s approach to intelligence
collection abroad. As I’ve indicated, the United States has unique
responsibilities when it comes to intelligence collection. Our
capabilities help protect not only our nation but our friends and
our allies as well.But our efforts will only be effective if ordinary citizens in
other countries have confidence that the United States respects
their privacy too. And the leaders of our close friends and allies
deserve to know that if I want to know what they think about an
issue I’ll pick up the phone and call them rather than turning to
surveillance.
Obama went on to say,
The bottom line is that people around the world, regardless of
their nationality, should know that the United States is not spying
on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security and
that we take their privacy concerns into account in our policies
and procedures.This applies to foreign leaders as well. Given the
understandable attention that this issue has received, I’ve made
clear to the intelligence community that unless there is a
compelling national security purpose, we will not monitor the
communications of heads of state and government of our close
friends and allies.
These statements may come as a surprise to German Chancellor
Angela Merkel considering that Obama
reportedly approved the tapping of her phone. Is there a
reason Obama didn’t feel like he could “pick up the
phone” to speak to her before Snowden’s revelations were
published? Unsurprisingly, the revelations relating to
American snooping on German officials
have soured U.S.-German relationship worse than the most recent
war in Iraq did.
More from Reason.com on the NSA here.
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