[China Daily]

What a colossal embarrassment for U.S. President Barack Obama. Just as he was holding summit-level talks about cyber security with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, during which he expressed America's disquiet at the allegedly high level of Chinese cyber-intelligence activities. At the same time, the scandal of the decade was breaking due to former CIA sub-contractor Edward Snowden's revelations that the U.S. was highly engaged in cyber spying through the PRISM program.

Snowden is being attacked in his home country for putting his own conscience ahead of his country's interests. Others think he is a hero for doing just that. Snowden's own version is simple: "I'm not a hero, nor a traitor; I'm just an American." And there is something essentially American about what Snowden did; it would, for instance, have been very un-Chinese to act in the way he did.

What the Snowden story, and the massive American reaction to it, shows is that there is no point in any country getting onto a high horse about intelligence work; every country is engaged in it and every country attempts to keep it secret. It isn't even necessarily a bad thing from the point of view of global security. In order to avoid potentially disastrous policy mistakes, each great power has to come to a realistic assessment of the intentions and capabilities of other great powers.

Obviously the proper way to gather this information is through conventional diplomacy, as when the two presidents met in California earlier this month; but there one is not getting the whole story. Good diplomats don't lie, but they don't always tell the whole truth. The simple fact is that every country wants to keep its secrets, and every other country wants to discover those secrets. That is not a question of morality but a fact of life. And, as the Xi-Obama summit showed, the best way forward is to establish a set of mutually agreed guidelines for peaceful co-existence on the intelligence front.

But this episode is a major embarrassment for the Americans; that is why they are so angry. Part of the problem is the peculiarly American passion for doing everything on the cheap. Americans don't, or pretend they don't, like taxes or governments or public servants. They demand cost-cutting everywhere, just like in the private sector. And so, as the American (and British) private sectors shed thousands of steady jobs in favor of disposable contract workers provided by fly-by-night agencies, governments are beginning to do the same thing, even at the heart of the security establishment. Edward Snowden was one of tens of thousands of contractors hired on the cheap to do a job which required proper state agents who are shown, and expected to reciprocate, loyalty.

More depressingly, the U.S reaction is mired in the Cold War mentality. It pains the Americans that Snowden picked Hong Kong as the place from which to make his revelations. Snowden explained that this was because Hong Kong has a fair and dependable justice system, and this is perfectly correct. But all the Americans can see is that Hong Kong now belongs to China and the idea remains that China, because her outward form of government has not changed and they are therefore still "Commies", remains, at bottom, an enemy of the U.S. As a result, they view Mr Snowden as a "traitor" (U.S. House Speaker John Boehner) who is dangerous because he may "defect" to China with all the CIA's secrets. This, of course, harks back to the spy thrillers of the original Cold War, where the only option for a revealer of secrets was to go to the Soviet Union or the U.S., depending on which side he came from, and stay there. (Interestingly, President Putin has chosen to stir this particular pot by suggesting through a spokesman that Snowden might wish to seek asylum in Moscow.) But China is not the Soviet Union, and these comparisons are sloppy and destructive; U.K. and U.S. diplomats were being told they must not make friends with any Chinese citizen as late as 2003, a rule which I comprehensively broke.

Both China and the U.S., from their rather different perspectives, are struggling to reach the correct balance between national security on the one hand and the rights of the citizen on the other. It is simply not right to say that one country stands for the one principle and the other for another. China knows that her ultimate strength lies in her numerous, well-educated and hard-working citizens, and that those citizens need a degree of liberty and privacy to develop their creativity; and the U.S. knows that the main duty of any government is to ensure national security (a recent poll in the U.S. suggested that 62 percent of Americans regard the preservation of national security as more important than issues of personal privacy). There is no sensible response to the Snowden episode other than to reflect on these simple facts.

The author is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:

http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/timcollard.htm

Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn

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