Spying hits home

Editorial: Spying hits home

By Boston Herald editorial staff|9 hours ago

There is no getting around the fact that the National Security Agency has continued to eavesdrop on at least a handful of friendly foreign leaders, but - even worse - on the private conversations of U.S. lawmakers and on Jewish-American groups.

The revelations in yesterday's Wall Street Journal are beyond shocking - although perhaps we should cease to be shocked by anything this administration does to further its agenda.

Now frankly it's not shocking that the NSA continued to keep tabs on the conversations of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, even after public promises that it would cease the practice. (The leaders of France and Germany apparently made the special list of good guys no longer subject to such surveillance.)

Former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren said during a TV interview Wednesday that Israel assumes that the U.S. and others attempt to spy on it.

"It's not very nice, but that is the assumption," Oren said. And when he had anything confidential to convey, "I got on a plane," he added.

But by continuing to target Israeli officials at a particularly delicate time - during the crafting of the Iran nuclear deal and efforts that would follow to have it approved by the Congress - the surveillance also picked up conversations between Israelis and members of Congress, especially those who needed to be persuaded to vote against the nuclear deal. So, too, Jewish-American groups actively involved in lobbying efforts against the deal.

The NSA's goal was "to give us an accurate illustrative picture of what [the Israelis] were doing," a senior U.S. official told the Journal.

And if the rights of elected public officials and private U.S. citizens were violated in the process, well, no big deal, right?

In fact, the White House was so wary of creating a paper trail that they let the NSA decide what to pass along. The names of individual lawmakers were reportedly removed from the intelligence reports before being passed on to the Obama administration, but that hardly instills confidence in the process.

This wasn't about national security at all at that stage of the game. It was about raw politics - who was going to vote for the Iran deal and who wasn't.

The NSA was being used for political purposes. And the Congress, which was subject to that violation of rights, has the responsibility to get to the bottom