Subject: [NEXTEL-1] What's the etiquette for spying on friends?

From: Marcelrf <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2004 13:12:18 -0500

http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2004/Feb/27/op/op03a.html

Posted on: Friday, February 27, 2004
EDITORIAL
What's the etiquette for spying on friends?

What's odd about this week's drama in London is how little reverberation
it's causing in Washington.

Katharine Gun, a translator at Britain's secret eavesdropping agency,
the
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), had been facing two years
in
prison on a charge of violating the Official Secrets Act. But the moment
she
entered her innocent plea Wednesday, the government dropped its case.

Gun's case may be only the beginning of a larger scandal. A former
British
Cabinet minister now says that British spies have regularly bugged the
office of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan.

Last year, as the United States and Britain prepared to invade Iraq, Gun
came across an e-mail from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA),
asking
GCHQ to mount a "surge" of spying against members of the U.N. Security
Council whose votes would be crucial to passing a second resolution
authorizing war.

Gun was outraged at what she considered an attempt to subvert the U.N.
So
she leaked the memo to the Observer newspaper, which then reported that
the
NSA stepped up eavesdropping on officials from Angola, Cameroon, Chile,
Bulgaria, Guinea and Pakistan, all members of the Security Council at
the
time.

Gun was not about to go quietly. She claimed a defense of "necessity" -
that
her leak was required to prevent an illegal war.

What puzzles us is why there isn't even a slight hint of embarrassment
in
Washington. Perhaps it's naive to be surprised that we've been spying on
friendly diplomats. But when we're caught red-handed, shouldn't we at
least
act a bit sheepish?

More to the point, Gun correctly saw that such bugging operations are
contrary to international law and conventions, and a threat to the very
legality that is the basis, in and between our Western democracies, of
trust
and justice.

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