The Real 'Danger' Of Snowden And Manning: The US Can't Get Away With Its Powerful Hypocrisy Anymore
We were among those who noted that the recent stories about the NSA spying on politicians in Brazil, France, Mexico, Germany and elsewhere seemed more like political theater than anything else. After all, spying on foreign politicians, even allies, is what countries do. So the supposed "outrage" seemed somewhat silly. It really felt like the kind of thing that politicians felt they had to do following the revelations, because everyone expected them to do so. Any actual outrage was likely tempered by the fact that their own intelligence agencies basically were trying to do the same damn thing to everyone else (and some of them have probably succeeded).
However, Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore have an astoundingly good article for Foreign Affairs called The End of Hypocrisy which makes a point so obvious, so clear and so almost certainly right that almost everyone has ignored it until now. Much of the article is technically behind a paywall, but hopefully the link above gets you past it (Farrell seems to be handing out links that go through the paywall on Twitter like candy on Halloween, so if you still can't get in, just ask). The basic premise is this: the leaks from the likes of Ed Snowden and Chelsea Manning are hardly earth shattering in terms of what they reveal. As plenty of people have noted, most of what they've released has been widely suspected, if not known by many. While the specifics really do matter for those aiming to get a handle on what the US (and others) are doing, and to stop the really egregious behavior, the idea that any of these revelations really harmed active intelligence gathering appears to be little more than smoke and mirrors. As the article notes, even with all the rhetoric about "harm" caused by these leaks, officials have "often struggled to explain exactly why these leaks pose such an enormous threat."
What Farrell and Finnemore note, instead, is that the really powerful and devastating impact of these leaks is not directly on the intelligence community, but rather on the US's use of hypocrisy as a policy tool.


