70 Million Calls
Tapping into the personal mobile phone of the German Chancellor - Angela Merkel - is or was clearly a crazy thing to do to the leading politician of a friendly country - but I'm not so sure that this is the crux of the issue when it comes to a serious debate on national security.
For example, I came across an article about national security services in America intercepting millions of phone calls in France - here's a little extract of what it had to say:
"The U.S. ambassador to France met with French diplomats Monday over allegations that the National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted more than 70 million phone calls in France over a 30-day period.
Ambassador Charles Rivkin was summoned to the French Foreign Ministry in Paris after the details of the alleged spying appeared in the French newspaper Le Monde."
Now I didn't read much more of the piece because I said to myself - Is anyone seriously suggesting that the NSA is actively listening into or acting upon the contents of very many of these phone calls?
If so, the NSA must have recruited thousands of extra spooks and spies in recent times - since there's no way that American security services, or any else's for that matter, would possibly be able to delve into the detail of so many calls.
What would be the point?
I suspect the real explanation is that the NSA and other security agencies have the ability to tap into all of these calls in their search for people who would carry out terrorist atrocities - if only they could.
But that they only do so when they have a real suspicion that someone within that huge mass of 70 million calls - is up to no good and is either breaking or planning to break the law.
None of which is any different to what has been happening for years - other than the fact that the nature of the threat has changed substantially - along with the mobile telephony and computer technology which did not even exist 20 years ago.
For example, do you remember the movie 'Midnight Run' in which Rob De Niro's character - a wily bounty hunter - is transporting a bail jumper (Charles Grodin) all the way across America while being hunted by Mafia-style criminals.
As he travels east to west, two things are very striking - De Niro is smoking everywhere he goes and he has to keep using public phone boxes to report on his progress - which almost no one does these days.
