NSA surveillance is within democracy’s bounds

[Commentary] Perhaps it was inevitable that Edward Snowden’s revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) monitoring of Europe would prompt some people to liken the U.S. government to the Stasi, Communist East Germany’s notorious secret police. Fortunately for two important causes — transatlantic relations and sensible political discourse — Chancellor Angela has challenged this spurious equivalency. As Germany’s first chancellor from the east, Merkel spoke with special authority. It’s important, though, to understand specifically why she is right.

The methods of surveillance and intelligence-gathering — bribery, blackmail, wiretapping, infiltration and the rest — are not normal tools of democratic governance. To the contrary: There is a basic tension, or trade-off, between democracy and secrecy, and it’s absurd to deny it. Yet it is equally absurd to suggest, as Jakob Augstein did in Der Spiegel, that “no matter in what system or to what purpose: A monitored human being is not a free human being.” The political goals and institutional context of a given state’s intelligence-gathering make all the difference. Given the threats to democracy, and the technological milieu from which they may emerge, the United States needs to engage in data collection on a wide scale, both at home and abroad. The issue is whether it has checks and balances to ensure that these means remain politically and legally subordinate to legitimate ends. On that score, there’s good news and not-so-good news in Snowden’s revelations.