Discord Over Snooping Muted by Security Fears

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/23/world/europe/discord-over-snooping-muted-by-security-fears.html

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PARIS — In July 2013, a month after former C.I.A. contractor Edward Snowden shocked the world with his revelations of a massive United States surveillance program, a top French government minister took the stage at the American Embassy’s Fourth of July party here to gently scold his hosts for spying on friends.

On the same day, the French newspaper Le Monde broke a story about what it called France’s own Big Brother surveillance program. The article revealed “two excellent reasons” why France’s reaction to Mr. Snowden’s disclosures had been relatively muted. “Paris was already informed,” the paper wrote. “And it does the same thing.”

Much has changed since June 2013, when the Snowden revelations unleashed a global debate about how to balance the right to privacy with the need for national security. That debate is still alive but its parameters have changed, particularly in Europe, where public opinion has shifted in reaction to recurrent terrorist attacks on the Continent.

Today, widespread popular outrage in Europe at whole-scale American snooping — which three years ago was both real and feigned — has been replaced by calls for more effective intelligence gathering at home.

“There was a time in France and Germany when people would put privacy above security, but that is changing,” said Anthony Glees, director of the University of Buckingham’s Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies. “Whereas in 2013 they held up their hands in horror at what Snowden revealed, now they are holding up their hands in relief.”

If the French government’s reaction to the Snowden revelations was mild, Germany’s was positively electric, in keeping with the country’s heightened sensitivity to violations of privacy. When it came out that the Americans had listened to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s own cellphone, she took it up directly with President Barack Obama.

Then in November 2015, Der Spiegel published an article saying that Germany’s intelligence service had itself been spying on foreign governments, European, American, even the Vatican, and international organizations such as the United Nations, Oxfam and Care.

Since 2013, several European governments have seized on the public’s fear of terrorism to expand surveillance but also to put in place better safeguards to control it, with clearer rules and more stringent civilian oversight.

France, Germany and Britain are now in the process of adapting surveillance laws in the face of the terrorist threat.

In Germany, terrorist attacks this summer prompted the government to step up security efforts, including closer surveillance of the so-called “dark web,” where terrorist communications often lurk.

In Britain, a proposed Investigatory Powers bill — also known as the “snoopers’ charter” — would essentially enshrine in law the bulk data collection and phone-hacking operations carried out by British secret services that were revealed by Mr. Snowden along with National Security Agency operations.

Raffaello Pantucci, director of International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London, noted that, as the debate on appropriate government surveillance evolves, secret service agencies have an interest in defining their limits.

“What is interesting in the U.K. is that, while the agencies are pushing for as much as they can, they also recognize that it is important to have oversight,” he said. “They have no interest in living in an Orwellian world either. It is a question of having the right structures.”

According to Mr. Glees, the latest British bill is a roundabout way for the government to avoid public acknowledgement of what it was already doing. “The Investigatory Powers bill is in a sense for show,” he said. “The government is not saying, yes, we are doing it but rather saying, we must do better to regulate it.”

In the meantime, the jury is out on how effective massive data collection efforts have been in identifying terrorists and stopping attacks. In the wake of the Snowden disclosures, a report by the United States Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board on the collection of telephone records of millions of Americans found no instance in which “the program made a concrete difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism operation.”

Some experts beg to differ, noting that counterterrorist operations are necessarily secretive. Some also said that terrorist groups shut down communication networks in the wake of Mr. Snowden’s disclosures. “The behavior of terrorist groups has changed,” said Mr. Pantucci. “There was a negative impact of these revelations.”

What has also changed since 2013 is that there is an ever growing awareness of how the concept of privacy has shifted in an era when citizens freely dish up information about their location, their communications, their purchases, their dining choices and travel plans to private internet companies, which in turn use the information for their own profit.

Whether those companies can be forced to hand over this information to government agencies on the lookout for suspicious actors and activities is another matter. The fact is that what once might have been considered personal information has now become public.

As the British newspaper The Guardian put it last November, state surveillance is only the half of it. “If you know someone’s real name, it doesn’t take much to find out where they live, who they like to sleep with and what their sister’s name is,” the columnist David Shariatmadari wrote.

Ordinary citizens don’t have to look far for examples of how private information has become vulnerable to public exposure. From the hacking scandals at News of the World in Britain, to the data breaches at Sony Pictures to the recent release of Democratic National Committee documents to WikiLeaks, leaks — or some might say, theft — of personal details are becoming alarmingly frequent, sometimes with embarrassing or financially devastating consequences.

Tech entrepreneurs have responded by creating encrypted communication systems that promise users that their information will be kept confidential. That is the good news, hailed by Mr. Snowden himself in an opinion piece for The New York Times.

The bad news is that these systems are favored by terrorist groups like the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. According to French investigators, one such system, Telegram Messenger, was used by terrorists ahead of two recent attacks in France.

Created by two Russian brothers who had to flee Russia under government pressure, Telegram finally agreed last February — after the November 2015 attacks in Paris — to close down 78 ISIS-linked platforms.

But its founder, Pavel Durov, publicly backed the technology giant Apple this year when it refused to cooperate with the F.B.I. and unlock the phone owned by the killer in the December 2015 San Bernadino massacre.

“Our right to privacy is more important than fear of terrorism,” Mr. Durov said at the time.

That’s not a view shared by the French police who, like the F.B.I. in the San Bernadino case, were able to get access to the terrorists’ messages — although not in time to prevent the attacks.