We are living in a golden age of phone tapping. All over the world, there are headlines about snooping, both legal and illegal, and how to protect yourself from it.
The most dramatic events are in Turkey where prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is facing calls for his resignation after the release of an alleged phone call in which he appears to order his son to hide eye-watering sums of money from anti-corruption investigators. He says the recording is a “shameless montage”.
In Germany, Deutsche Telekom has announced that it will offer mobile phone users the ability to encrypt their voice calls and messages, after the revelation that the US National Security Agency had been intercepting chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile calls. Though the US has now promised to leave the chancellor’s phone alone, German media say the agency has focused its attentions on her ministers and staff instead.
In a country with fresh memories of the surveillance state under the Nazis and the East German communists, this issue is serious enough to prompt calls for a European-only internet which would be less easily penetrated by the NSA.
In the tech world, the “stealth phone” is replacing the smart phone for high-end users. Boeing has announced one that self-destructs if anyone tries to tamper with it.
In Britain, the debate is more vulgar, driven by a long-running trial of six tabloid newspaper editors and journalists who are charged with intercepting voicemail messages of celebrities, members of the royal family, politicians and, most shockingly, of a murdered teenage girl. All six deny the charges.
All these cases are different but they point to a common theme – the extraordinary ease with which digital communications, even encrypted ones, can be intercepted. This used to be a dirty secret closely held by the world’s spy agencies.
But since Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor, revealed the global scale and penetration of US snooping, no one feels much restraint in showing off their wiretapping ability. Rather, other countries want to boast that they are not far behind the Americans.
This was demonstrated when the Russians publicised an intercepted phone call between the US Ambassador in Kiev and a senior State Department official, Victoria Nuland, in which she spoke in disparaging terms of the European Union. When her unguarded comments were revealed, Ms Nuland praised the Russians – tongue in cheek – for their “pretty impressive tradecraft”, suggesting they had exposed their spying capability for the sake of making a little diplomatic mischief.
It is in Turkey that tapped phone calls, secret recordings and clandestine video have become a national obsession. This has been building up for at least the last five years, since Mr Erdogan’s government was constructing a criminal case against an alleged secret secularist organisation called “Ergenikon” which supposedly included generals, opposition politicians and journalists. During the subsequent trials, many phone transcripts emerged, leading Turks to fear that no electronic communication was secure.
Mr Erdogan himself said in a television interview in 2009 that he worried that his calls were being intercepted. “I’m not comfortable speaking over the phone,” he said. “I tell people who want to speak on the phone to come and visit me.”
Despite his concern, most of the intercepts seemed at the time to be aimed at opponents of his ruling Justice and Development Party. That has changed. Responding to the latest published transcript, he said that even the state’s encrypted telephone system is being tapped. Officials have sought to explain the recording of him and his son Bilal by saying it appears to be an edit of 18 months of wiretapping designed to sound incriminating.
Collecting embarrassing material for blackmail or prosecution is nothing new and certainly not confined to Turkey. The founder of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover, was accused by former president Harry Truman of running his own private Gestapo. He thought all politicians were up to no good, and by the time he died in 1972, he had compiled 883 files on senators and 722 on congressmen.
Turkey’s battle of the wiretaps is a typical example of political struggles conducted within the institutions of state, rather than between parties. Though Turkey is a functioning democracy, there is no credible secular or leftist opposition to Mr Erdogan after a decade in power.
The struggle for control of Turkey appears to be between the prime minister’s party and the followers of the self-exiled Fethullah Gulen. Mr Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania, sees himself as an educationist and spiritual leader and has no political party. An aide to Mr Erdogan has accused highly placed Gulenists of running a “parallel state” and carrying out mass wiretapping to concoct criminal cases against figures close to the prime minister.
A similar battle within the institutions of state can be seen in Russia, where political opposition in parliament is strictly limited. Instead, rival interest groups fight for dominance through what is called “kompromat” – compromising material – handed to friendly TV stations or other media. The same goes, in a more subdued way, in the Vatican, where overt politicking is frowned on but clashes of interest and personality are still fierce.
The answer to these abuses is simple: strong state institutions which punish illegal wiretapping and exercise strict oversight of the agencies which do it legally. This is a tough call even in the United States, since the ease of digital snooping has made the spy agencies ever greedier for citizens’ data.
But what if the state institutions are weak and divided? The choice is to avoid communicating anything sensitive on digital devices. Or not to care, and live one’s life in public. But that is scarcely feasible. Even heedless teenagers are now saved from lifetime embarrassment by Snapchat, the messaging service which automatically destroys images after a few seconds viewing.
Maybe in the end the only protection from the snoopers is old-fashioned pen and paper.
aphilps@thenational.ae
On Twitter: @aphilps
