UN anti-spying draft resolution completely ignores ‘national sovereignty’ issue

Since the UN resolution introduced by Germany and Brazil to counteract NSA spying and support online privacy will be nonbinding, regardless of the outcome the US will simply ignore it, an investigative journalist Manuel Ochsenreiter told RT.

The draft, Ochsenreiter added, deals only with privacy issues but does not cover the important issue of national sovereignty and US spying on the territory of other countries.

RT:Is this resolution just a political gesture to appease the public, but nothing will come of it, or are you expecting something concrete to come out of it at the end of the day?

Manuel Ochsenreiter: I think exactly as you said, it’s a political gesture, a sort of symbolic measure. Our German government is doing it now, to please public opinion, because when we look at the resolution, it just hits one aspect of this and this is privacy, but it doesn’t hit another aspect at all, which is as important as the privacy, and this is national sovereignty.

So our government tries to distract political attention on this privacy aspect, not to discuss the national sovereignty aspect because this is a problem, which really hits German politics. Germany is the most powerful country in the European Union. People say it’s the leading nation; it’s the most economically powerful nation. And when we see on the other side that some 68 years since the end of World War Two, there are US army facilities, barracks, American soldiers. Until today we have US nuclear war heads on German soil. So we know those facilities are used for spying on German citizens as well as on the German Chancellor. So this is the real problem and just putting this on this resolution discussing privacy laws, doesn’t discuss the important thing at all. 

RT:Its interesting though to look at the timing of the current complaining isn’t it? Merkel contacted Obama to complain about NSA snooping only when she found out, she’d personally been targeted, why didn’t the government show the same concern I wonder, back in the summer when it became clear that German citizens were being monitored? 

MO: This is one of the master questions right now because if we remember back in June 2013, when it came out that the Americans were spying on masses of German citizens, our government headed by Angela Merkel, told the Germans that all these things are not issues and that the US is our partners and friend, so they were the pro-American defenders of what took place, so Merkel’s party even ended the discussion officially. A member of Merkel’s party said in the media now the discussion has to end about this. 

So now when it came out that they spy on Merkel’s mobile phone, the US puts our chancellor in a very embarrassing situation because she must feel betrayed of course by Washington. And I think for her this is enough and now she’s under pressure to act because in public she cannot accept that a foreign power is spying on her mobile phone, especially when this foreign power claims to be our partner. 

RT:Well, I guess no matter how much Germany stamps its feet, General Assembly resolutions aren’t binding are they, unlike Security Council Resolutions, so even if it passed, although it is embarrassing, as you said the US could simply ignore it? 

MO: Yes, of course because we are not talking about things like pollution by factories or other stuff, withdrawing military from here or there, we are talking about spying projects. The nature of spying is that it is done in a secret way, so we don’t have any guarantee that the United States would respect any resolution, and I dare to say that they wouldn’t respect it at all. May be they would develop some more technical means that won’t be discovered.