The United States federal government should cease its surveillance of foreign diplomats in the United States and at United States embassies

EU Advantage

***uk coop

internal link – chilling effect

The perception of embassy spying absolutely wrecks US-UK data sharing and precludes ambassadorial cooperation

Now everyone knows why GCHQ has long refused to store information classified at restricted or above in US cloud computing services. A recent University of Pennsylvania study confirmed that the secrecy bureaucracy often stops even the intelligence community getting anything useful done. And thanks to Snowden's revelations it's about to get worse. The threat of enemy (or ally) spying has led Whitehall to build a byzantine structure of security clearances, with information classified as protect, restricted, confidential, secret or top secret. But Snowden revealed it gets even more complicated, with "strap" levels. He was cleared to strap 1, although his files have strap 2 and strap 3 content. The UK recently announced a new classification scheme but it will be incompatible with the US system so will cause chaos when information goes back and forth. Meanwhile, the director of the NSA has vowed to fire most of his system administrators, because that's what Snowden was, so there will be nobody able to deal with the fallout. The diplomat With the dust not yet settled after the leak of 250,000 rather undiplomatic US embassy cables by Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, Snowden revealed that the US is also spying on a number of its traditional allies, including the EU missions in New York, the French, Italian and Greek embassies, and countries such as Spain, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, India and Turkey. So diplomats can be under no illusions that any of their communications are safe - prompting a novel reaction from the Indian high commissioner in London, who ordered his staff to use typewriters to prepare sensitive documents and to be careful what they say because of bugs.

American spying chills British cooperation with the US – regardless of the formal status of relations

But the scope of the damage the Americans have inflicted so far is still only vaguely recognizable. Their initial response to the revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden in the summer of 2013 was that the Germans should get over themselves -- after all, they insisted, everything the NSA does takes place in the interest of freedom and strictly in accordance with law and order. But then came the revelations of the tapping of Merkel's mobile phone. It was an embarrassing incident for US President Barack Obama, who quickly gave Merkel his personal assurance that US intelligence would refrain from tapping her phone in the future. The inference was that it would be less likely to do so in other cases. The case of the CIA informant at the BND shows that Washington apparently still doesn't consider the massive technical efforts it undertakes to spy on the entire globe to be sufficient. It helps to explain why the numerous US intelligence agencies still manage human sources, just as they did in the bad old days, even in the nerve centers of Washington's close allies. The Federal Prosecutor's Office in Karlsruhe, Germany's top investigative agency, is now pursuing three cases of suspected espionage relating to the United States, supposedly Germany's closest ally. Even the biggest appeasers in Berlin must realize by now that the Americans are dead serious when it comes to their desire to know "everything," to quote an NSA document. There is a palpable sense of insecurity in Berlin's government district these days. Even lawmakers with many years of experience have become suspicious of the US Embassy, as well as the embassies of France, Great Britain and Russia. They are all merely a stone's throw from the offices and conference rooms where German politicians sometimes meet. Some now view the highly secured foreign embassies as little more than surveillance antennas surrounded by buildings. Many lawmakers involved with the intelligence services and their supervision have stopped discussing sensitive information on the phone or sending unencrypted emails, and they have taken to meeting in person, in public places, for confidential conversations. If they even take their mobile phones along, they sometimes use them to play loud lounge music, hoping to confuse unwelcome listeners.

impact – soft power

UK relations are key to US soft power

impact – terrorism

UK relations solve terrorism