The latest revelations come amid anger and fury; allegations that United States had tapped the mobile phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and that NSA had also monitored the Brazilian and Mexican leaders' communications, according to a local report. 

The National Security Agency monitored the phone conversations of 35 world leaders after being given the numbers by an official in another US government department, according to a classified document provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The confidential memo reveals that the NSA encourages senior officials in its "customer" departments, such as the White House,  State, and the Pentagon, to share their "Rolodexes" so the agency can add the phone numbers of leading foreign politicians to their surveillance systems. The document notes that one unnamed US official handed over 200 numbers, including those of the 35 world leaders, none of whom is named. These were immediately "tasked" for monitoring by the NSA. The NSA memo obtained by the Guardian suggests that such surveillance was not isolated, as the agency routinely monitors the phone numbers of world leaders -- and even asks for the assistance of other US officials to do so (Published Guardian October 24, 2013).  

European leaders have united in anger over the report. Herman Van Rompuy, European Council President, announced at a news conference that France and Germany were seeking bilateral talks with the US to resolve the dispute over "secret services" electronic spying by the end of this year. The report obtained by the Guardian dated 2006 suggests broad-based surveillance of leaders from the world. The Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta told reporters. "It is not in the least bit conceivable that activity of this type could be acceptable." German Chancellor Angela Merkel has stated that this expose has shattered trust in the Obama administration and undermined the crucial trans-Atlantic relationship (Aljazeera, October 25, 2013).  

According to a report by David Kravets, the incident setting off the idea was of an ordinary purse snatching in 1976 in Baltimore. A young woman passed by walking alone to her suburban home had her purse snatched and the assailant fled with it. The assailant Michael Lee Smith was apprehended weeks later, the court case instituted against him continued for three years, leading to a 10-year prison term. "Almost 35 years later, the court's decision -- in a case involving the recording of a single individual's phone records -- turns out to be the basis for a legal rationale justifying governmental spying on virtually all Americans. Smith v. Maryland, as the case is titled, set the binding precedent for what we now call metadata surveillance. 

That, in turn, has recently been revealed to be the keystone of the National Security Agency's bulk collection of US telephone data, in which the government chronicles every phone call originating or terminating in the United States, all in the name of the war on terror" (published October 3, 2013). 

This raises an interesting question though. The surveillance programme concerns surveillance of persons within the United States who were in contact with "terrorists" during the collection of foreign intelligence by the US National Security Agency (NSA) as part of the war on terror (David E. Sanger & John O' Neil January 23, 2006). Senior officials at the security agency determined that there is a "reasonable belief" that one party to a call between someone in America and someone overseas has a link to Al Qaeda, inside or outside the US. In light of global-terrorism incidents, this makes a lot of sense, in particular events leading to and onward 9/11. The tragic event that has changed the face of political relations between nations persuaded President George W. Bush to authorize the NSA to engage in a warrantless-wiretapping program. 

However, what does not make sense is extending the "warrantless eavesdropping program" tapped by Bush as the "terrorist-surveillance program" to encompass communication of leaders of the world and those obviously having no links or nexus with Al Qaeda or any terrorist outfit. Let us not forget that though Article 1 of United States Constitution vests broad-based rights in the Congress to institute laws as it deems proper in the domestic arena, it restricts its application on international level. 

Germany has summoned the US Ambassador to answer to the wiretapping claim. Merkel complained to President Barack Obama in a phone call after receiving information her cellphone may have been monitored. The White House said the US isn't monitoring and won't monitor Merkel's communications -- but didn't address what might have happened in the past. 

The implications here are frightening. It means no one, and absolut ely no one, is safe from surveillance of a most intimate and/or professional nature. 

The nature of the allegations leads to more questions.  What must be the guidelines NSA must follow in future so far as the warrantless-eavesdropping program is concerned? Will this be shared with other nations? How can the nations be assured that such a blueprint is being followed through by those responsible for running the programme? How does one balance the right of the US government of surveillance if there is a "reasonable belief" that one party to a call between someone in America and someone overseas has a link to Al Qaeda, inside or outside the US, as opposed to privacy rights? The key word here is "reasonable belief" that demands unambiguous contextual definition. These open questions need to be addressed. 

The advance of technology has, no doubt, allowed for surveillance in a world ridden with terror at levels not possible before. It has on the other hand raised serious ethical issues. The questions raised are not limited only to the legality of the procedure but on a more basic level; can an over-excited government push the boundaries to a degree where any level of the loss of its citizens' privacy becomes necessary? Where phones are wiretapped of international leaders violating the "reasonable belief" clause, some serious inquiry is called for. According to a report, Germany, France demand 'no-spy' agreement with US. However this too can be violated if clause of "reasonable belief" is-no? 

To set the record straight, it was much earlier, on June 6, 2013, that the Guardian reported that the NSA is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top-secret court order issued in April. "The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an 'ongoing, daily basis' to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries." According to details the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) granted the order to the FBI on April 25, giving the government unlimited authority to obtain the data for a specified three-month period ending on July 19. The law on which the order explicitly relies is the so-called "business records" provision of the Patriot Act, 50 USC section 1861. 

Relations between nations are built on trust and mutual respect and if lacking drives a wedge between the best of them. The world has come a long way. These allegations are a far cry from the days of Watergate, which included testimony provided by former staff members in an investigation conducted by the Senate Watergate Committee, revealing that President Nixon had a tape-recording system in his offices and he had recorded many conversations. He resigned. 

Charles de Gaulle summed up international relations beautifully: "Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.'' 

The writer is a lawyer, academic, and political analyst. She has authored a book titled A Comparative Analysis of Media & Media Laws in Pakistan. Her Twitter handle is @yasmeen_9 

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A week now after the initial revelation that the United States might have monitored the cellphone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, there’s little doubt that the story has been damaging for this country and for the National Security Agency, which earned the wrath of even longtime defender Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who oversees it as the Senate Intelligence Committee chair.

At the same time, though, the initial anger appears to be giving way to debate: Is it, in fact, a bad idea for the United States to spy on friendly foreign leaders such as Merkel?

That question might sound counterintuitive, even cynical, a sign of the depth of Americans’ hubris that we would even consider it. After all, friends don’t spy on each other, right? But I’m going to let you in on a little secret: The international system is, and always has been, inherently adversarial, even among allies. To paraphrase the 19th-century British statesman Lord Palmerston, countries don’t have friends, they have interests.

Spying on friendly foreign nations does not actually violate the standard practices of international relations and in many ways is consistent with those norms. The close U.S. allies France and Israel are particularly known for it. Still, something as explicit as tapping Merkel’s cellphone is a big and legitimately surprising step, one that may well go too far.

Here is an evaluation of the pros and cons involved that might help clarify why the United States would decide to take such a step.

The simplest case for spying might be that the United States and Germany, despite being allies, still compete with one another, sometimes on quite substantive issues. If spying can give them a leg up on those issues, then aren’t their leaders obligated to sanction it? President Barack Obama’s job, after all, is to further American interests, Merkel’s to further German interests. Those conflict more than you might think; when they do, both leaders are potentially better served if they spy on the other.

In 2011, for example, Obama wanted to intervene in Libya, but Merkel did not and could have used her substantial influence in Europe to reduce NATO’s participation. Ultimately, Germany was alone among Western nations in opposing the U.N. resolution on Libya and nearly alone in not providing military resources for the intervention. Merkel ended up coming under political pressure at home for the move.

Washington and Berlin have also clashed over how to manage the euro-zone crisis, the resolution and progress of which have far-reaching implications for the German and U.S. economies. If dropping in on Merkel’s phone calls can help the United States safeguard its economic and national security interests, that would seem to be a strong argument for doing so.

The case may be even starker with France, another major target of recently revealed NSA spying whose leaders have expressed official outrage at the surveillance.

It’s easy to forget today that in the 1960s, France made several provocative breaks with the American ally that had liberated its capital just two decades earlier. President Charles de Gaulle refused to cooperate on nuclear weapons with the United States, announcing a nuclear strategy of “defense in all directions” that was apparently intended to imply his willingness to use them against the Americans. He vetoed Britain’s entry into the European economic partnership that later developed into the European Union, which the United States had supported.

According to historian John Lewis Gaddis, de Gaulle even tried to persuade the leader of West Germany to loosen his ties with NATO, which would have seriously undermined the U.S.-led coalition and could have changed the course of the Cold War. Surely those were phone calls the United States would have been well-served by monitoring.

More U.S. spying on France may have again been useful in 1985, when New Zealand arrested two French agents caught sinking a Greenpeace ship that was set to interfere with some French nuclear tests. The United States was sucked into the incident but equivocated, perhaps believing Paris’s initial claim that the French government hadn’t been involved.

As a result of the imbroglio, U.S. nuclear war ships are still not permitted to dock in New Zealand. Who knows how it might have gone if the U.S. had had better intelligence on its French ally?

To be sure, the U.S.-French relationship is much closer now than it was in the 1960s or even the 1980s. Still, the yo-yoing alliance is a reminder that, even if Obama and French President Francois Hollande are buddy-buddy today, that can change quickly. The U.S.-German relationship has also had, shall we say, some historical ups and downs. There is no guarantee that just because two countries are allies today, with numerous mutual interests, this will necessarily be the case tomorrow.

Yet there’s something different about heads of state. Even if a foreign leader is, in some political sense, an extension of the country they run and thus just as fair game for eavesdropping as their country’s military and intelligence services, the United States does recognize that there’s something sacrosanct about heads of state.

That’s part of the thinking behind a 1976 executive order, issued by then-President Gerald Ford, prohibiting the U.S. government from political assassinations.

Even if you’re not convinced that heads of state deserve special respect from foreign spy agencies, there are real diplomatic ramifications to targeting them. Foreign militaries and intelligence agencies cannot have their pride offended by U.S. snooping because they are emotionless agencies, run by people who engage in these sorts of activities themselves and surely expect them. Merkel and Obama are also human beings; that they develop a sense of mutual trust and respect is important for their ability to cooperate on shared interests and to reach agreements.

Even if spying on Merkel can help further U.S. interests, the revelation has clearly offended her personally in ways that could set those interests back. And all the negative attention is certainly hurting the United States’ image in the eyes of German voters, who might become slightly less inclined to elect pro-Washington officials or support a pro-Washington agenda.

Maybe most illuminating is Merkel’s response. She has demanded that U.S. tech companies be required to notify European officials every time the United States files a warrant seeking information on a Europe-based customer, which could hamper U.S. intelligence efforts significantly.

She has also suggested that the United States and Germany simply sign an agreement not to spy on one another — which would finally level the playing field between their respective intelligence agencies, long dominated by the U.S.

Some analysts suspect this may be the real motive behind the outrage, as Richard McGregor and Geoff Dyer write in the Financial Times. If you can’t beat your American counterparts at the intelligence game, just find a way to stop playing.

“Frau Merkel has been listened to since she was a teenager,” Frederick Forsyth, a novelist and former Berlin-based correspondent told Reuters. “The only thing that amazes me about the furor is that it amazes people.”

A former French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, also suggested the European outrage may be less about the spying crossing any moral line and more about the extent of the United States’ intelligence dominance.

“Let’s be honest, we eavesdrop, too,” he told a French radio station. “Everyone is listening to everyone else. But we don’t have the same means as the United States, which makes us jealous.”

Even if Merkel really were unsurprised by the wiretapping and is only seizing on the revelation in a calculated attempt to undermine American intelligence dominance, it wouldn’t necessarily mean that tapping foreign leaders’ cellphones is ultimately in the United States’ best interests, of course. But it is at least a reminder that the international system is driven more by cutthroat self-interest, and less by principles of fairness and friendliness, than its leaders often suggest.

Max Fisher is The Washington Post’s foreign affairs blogger. He has a master’s degree in security studies from Johns Hopkins University.

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