Stacking Fault

Is the Special Relationship Compromised?

I happened to be reading extracts from Jane's Intelligence Review and was struck by the following article: Intelligence-sharing failures hamper war on terrorism. It's a pretty simple tale: England and America, once joined at the hip to defeat the scourge of godless communism and extremist Islam, are now entering a strained phase of the once intimate relationship. Termed "the special relationship," it goes back to the era of WWII when Churchill's England was one of the few countries in Europe to stand up against the Nazi's. Since that time we've had at least one popular intelligence sharing program under the Echelon banner.

Not familiar with Echelon? It's the semi-secret constellation of listening posts managed by the five (mostly) English speaking democracy's in the world: The US, Canada, England, Australia and New Zeland. The idea here is we share the cost of operating a network of listening posts around the world and when we find interesting information, we share it with our partners. Until recently, I had taken it for granted that the NSA was listening into conversations with at least one end-point in the United States. But I was thinking this was less of a flagrant disregard for FISA and more of a quid pro quo with our overseas partners. Rather than flagrantly violating the 1978 FISA prohibitions on domestic eavesdropping directly, I had simply supposed that when we needed a bit of domestic spying, we just asked or dear British friends for it.

It's not as outlandish as it sounds, and after a little bit of digging, I discovered that even James Bamford, author of Puzzle Palace agrees there's something to the argument. (see his 1999 Washington Post article Loud and Clear.) But if the NSA is spying domestically, as Risen and Lichtblau assert in their article Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts, my question is "why?" Why expose yourself to risks that are now all to obvious.

The only thing I can deduce is that the "Special relationship" is dead or floundering on the rocks.

posted by Matthew S. Hamrick @ 8:39 PM