LETTER FROM EUROPE: All Ears
Gedmin, Jeffrey
LET ROM EUROPE JEFFREY GEDMIN All Ears T HE CAPTAIN RENAULTS OF OLD EUROPE expressed "shock" in late February over allegations that the British had bugged the conversations of U.N. Secretary...
...Try "How to Become a Spy" and there are 1,280,000 entries...
...I once sat behind Strobe Talbott, Madeleine Albright's deputy secretary of state, on a flight from Washington to Frankfurt...
...Imagine...
...Only my sterling character kept me from sneaking peeks as the Deputy typed away...
...A few years ago our European friends fumed over allegations that the U.S...
...A 1971 New York lawsuit prevents police today from going into a Mosque under cover, even if the imam has been spewing pro-bin Laden rhetoric...
...Now Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags may help you, through use of a simple card, to gain entrance to your office...
...Like peering for a moment at the screen of the fellow's laptop across the aisle on the plane...
...Spying can be unpleasant...
...Or surveil your activity if you keep the card in your wallet...
...was about to devalue the dollar, used the information to profit handsomely by currency speculation...
...They say spying is the second oldest profession...
...Was it a memo to his friend the President on a new bold arms control initiative...
...Among nations, the most curious spying is called "friendly spying," what we allies do to one another...
...The French have a similar system, which intercepts around three million messages per minute...
...That explained why our German friends just knew too much, too precisely, during trade negotiations, the day after the American team had stayed up all night privately, it thought, plotting strategy in its suite...
...But let's face it, indignation over spying is pretty silly...
...Tony Blair responded by saying (a) the UK abides by domestic law...
...Historians date spying at least as far back as 500 B.C...
...The CIA was once set up to bug the suite of a friendly Arab leader at a Gulf summit when, at the last minute, there was a change of rooms and the U.S...
...and (c) London does what it must to protect the interests of the nation...
...Search Google for "weird spy stories" and you get 156,000 hits...
...was using intercepted phone calls and e-mails to advantage American companies...
...During the Clinton administration I stayed in a Berlin hotel that sources later reported was bugged by the German government...
...In some states, "fuzz busters" for cars are legal...
...b) Great Britain adheres to international law...
...We celebrate the mystery and, yes, the deception...
...So do those Renaults, I bet...
...Shocking...
...Google yields 4,410,000 hits for Ian Fleming's character James Bond...
...We Americans are funny about these things...
...Things are getting more complicated...
...Most of us find this spying stuff intriguing, even entertaining...
...In 1971 a former French spymaster actually admitted in his memoirs that Paris, having learned that the U.S...
...Israel spies on us...
...Ditto Germany...
...There are different kinds of spying, of course, with countless methods, both "legal" and "illegal...
...Companies spy daily on employees to make sure they are not using work time to play computer video games or download porn...
...Is My Friend a Spy" gets you 1,360,000 items to peruse...
...Now America has a special relationship with Israel...
...As a student I once sold books for Time-Life over the phone...
...Jeffrey Gedmin is director of the Aspen Institute Berlin...
...Strobe was on his way to Russia...
...Bingo...
...I quit after day one when I learned that my phone calls—to maintain "customer quality control"—were being "monitored...
...Don't get me wrong...
...president ended up residing in the pre-wired space...
...You see, we can act preemptively in Iraq, but in New York the crime needs to be committed first before law enforcement can respond...
...How shocking...
...First class seats on Air France have always been thought to be bugged (with tidbits of business gossip passed on to hungry French competitors...
...There are at least 100 mentions of spying in the Bible...
...True, there's also a form of innocent spying—call it harmless snooping—of which nearly everybody is at 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 2004 one time or another guilty...
...What...
...Secretary General Kofi Annan...
...We spy on Israel...
...Word last year was that the Bush administration was up to the same sort of thing...
...Gambling in Las Vegas...
...Spying at the UN...
...Ethically there are a thousand shades of gray...
Vol. 37 • April 2004 • No. 3
