OBBO: If I were president, I also would spy more on my friends than on my foes

One of the big international stories of recent months has been the scandal of the USA’s National Security Agency’s widespread phone tapping and email monitoring that covered most of the world.

In the last few days there has been renewed fury when it emerged that the NSA was snooping on the cellphones of even close allies like Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff, French leaders, and now Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel.

IT'S AMERICA'S PHILOSOPHY TO SPY

We can take it that the Americans have listened in on all the conversations of all African leaders.

Yet for all the reams of newsprint and TV airtime spent on the NSA spying, I think it is actually a non-story.

If I were president of a powerful country with the money and technology to do so, I too would spy on all the leaders of the world, including my close allies.

I would also expect that they too would do the same. That is why the greater surprise for me is not that the Americans tapped Merkel’s cellphone, but that the Germans with all their tech savvy did not invest in sufficient encryption to foil it.

And surely, the Brazilians are smart enough to protect President Rousseff’s phone.

I can understand a president from a banana or cashew-nut republic without the sophisticated technology failing to protect his phone. But even they can do something about it.

Some African presidents don’t give any incriminating instructions through writing or phone. You go to State House, sit with them under a shade in the gardens, and they whisper the instructions in your ears.
In that sense, they are cleverer than the Brazilians and Germans. As far as we know, the Americans don’t yet have the means to tap that.

MUSEVENI'S PHILOSOPHY

In Uganda, President Yoweri Museveni, a former guerrilla who is wise to the ways of the cloak-and-dagger world, once shocked a journalist who was in his office.

He wanted to make a confidential call to someone, so he reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a small envelope and took out a SIM card that he slotted into a phone and called.

The journalist inquired why he, a “whole” president, had a SIM card kept away in his pocket like a market vendor. Museveni responded with a chuckle and explained that his intelligence chiefs and the world knew his official cellphone numbers, but they didn’t know that of the random SIM cards he acquired in sly ways. And he was right.

But the NSA snooping scandal also revealed a bigger problem — how to deal with our friends, allies, and those we love.

Dealing with our enemies is easy. We know they don’t like us, and are plotting every minute to destroy the things we value. Over the years, we have built structures and approaches to deal with them.

We avoid them; we build stronger armies than theirs; we spy on them to avoid them surprising us with an attack; we mobilise our friends and citizens against them; we demonise them; and we try and attack and destroy them first before they do the same to us, and so forth.

Dealing with friends is more difficult. You have to trust them and that allows them to get closer to you than your enemies. If you shared a house with a friend, you wouldn’t bother to lock your bedroom door. But if you did so with an enemy, you would bolt your door and place a chair against it.

Therefore, if you shared a house with a friend who then turns against you after midnight and decides to sneak into your room and murder you, you are more likely to be dead in the morning than if you slept next door to an enemy.

This is because you can never be sure when your friend or ally will go rogue and stick a knife in your back. Because they are close and you have no defences against them, you’re more vulnerable to them.

This great moral dilemma of human civilisation is why the greatest myths, histories, tragedies, films, love stories, and political dramas are about betrayal. We don’t expect any better of our enemies. But when our friends turn against us, it breaks us.

That is why, if I were president, I would probably spy more on my friends than on my enemies.

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