Why Does France Get Publicly-Reported Phone Calls?

The White House just released a readout of a call between President Obama and French President François Hollande pertaining to the spying revealed yesterday by Le Monde.

Readout of the President’s Call with President Hollande of France

The President spoke today with President Hollande of France. The United States and France are allies and friends, and share a close working relationship on a wide range of issues, including security and intelligence. The President and President Hollande discussed recent disclosures in the press – some of which have distorted our activities and some of which raise legitimate questions for our friends and allies about how these capabilities are employed. The President made clear that the United States has begun to review the way that we gather intelligence, so that we properly balance the legitimate security concerns of our citizens and allies with the privacy concerns that all people share. The two Presidents agreed that we should continue to discuss these issues in diplomatic channels moving forward.  The two leaders also discussed the ongoing violence in Syria and the importance of a political solution to the crisis.

Such releases tend to be blather, so I don’t take all that much from the content of the readout.

But I am interested that they released it.

Remember, this is not the first conversation with an angry world leader Obama has had about the runaway NSA. Angela Merkel, Dilma Rousseff, and Enrique Peña Nieto have as well. And while Obama was in Germany not long after the initial Germany releases, and saw Rousseff at the G20 in Russia not long after the worst of the Brazilian stories, I don’t see any call with Peña Nieto. Plus, we know there was a follow-up call between Obama and Rousseff on September 16 (he was supposed to report his findings about the nature of NSA’s spying on Brazil and Rousseff; she called off her State Visit the day afterwards).

I assume the Obama-Rousseff call couldn’t be spun into a happy message like this one.

But what of the call to Peña Nieto? Or did he already know about the spying they did before he was elected, because content from it has been used to pressure him to keep the DEA presence in Mexico?

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8 replies
  1. Snoopdido says:

    This part of the readout seems to imply that there is some actual White House pushback on the NSA overreach:

    “The President made clear that the United States has begun to review the way that we gather intelligence, so that we properly balance the legitimate security concerns of our citizens and allies with the privacy concerns that all people share.”

    It may simply be a reference to the Clapper “Dragnet and be happy” committee, but if I were to guess what the White House political take is on the Snowden NSA revelations to date, I’d have to say they too believe that the NSA is out of control.

    That doesn’t mean I think they weren’t happy to let the NSA do whatever they wanted before the Snowden NSA revelations. It just means that the White House politicos are concerned now about the political fallout and whatever it might do to damage their image and agendas.

  2. Arbusto says:

    As a conspiracy aficionado, I wonder how NSA intercepts and dissemination may have benefited Nieto and the PRI resurgence in ’12.

  3. orionATL says:

    @Snoopdido:

    i absolutely do not trust the whitehouse or president obama on any matter related to government secrecy or “national secirity”. i presume 20 years from now historians will have begun to tell y’all why. right now, for me, all i can see are hurrahs/support-the-troops, totally unnecessary public lies, abuse of doj power and of law, and gross brutality as a “show of o’s macho” for public consumption.

    with that long-winded prologue completed, snoopdidoo,

    i think you are quite right. the obama w’house has had its fill of generalissimo keith. that has become clear beginning with unattributed pejorative “administration” comments, now 3-4 months old, about “the emperor keith” and his previous “on the edges of legality” overreach.

    but what will the obama w’house do about the nsa overreach?

    i don’t know, but if you believe, as i do, that senator feinstein is the w’houses’ intelligence bus-girl in the senate, cleaning up the spilled wine cups and throw-up from the nsa blow-up,

    it will be damned little.

    as you say:

    “..That doesn’t mean I think they weren’t happy to let the NSA do whatever they wanted before the Snowden NSA revelations. It just means that the White House politicos are concerned now about the political fallout and whatever it might do to damage their image and agendas…”

    i think that is a very astute assessment, one precisely in line with this prez’s history so far.

  4. earlofhuntingdon says:

    As Mr. Bush refused to be photographed at funerals or alongside coffins of his war dead, Mr. Obama refuses to allow publicity about the costs of his own overreaching ambitions.

  5. Snoopdido says:

    @orionATL: The White House politicos aren’t looking at the Snowden NSA revelations through an ethical or even a legal lens.

    Instead the White House politicos are looking at the Snowden NSA revelations through the lens of political expediency. With that view, they focus only on whether there will be negative political or positive political results.

    That isn’t to say that there aren’t some in the Obama administration who aren’t seeing the Snowden NSA revelations from a legal or ethical viewpoint. Just that those people stand further back in line than the White House politicos when it comes to decision making, and this isn’t unique to the Obama administration.

    As to whether we’ll see any changes to the NSA’s overreach, I think right now with too little of the NSA’s overreach subject to sunsetting, without some really bad future Snowden NSA revelations that change the Congressional dynamics, Senator Feinstein and friends are in position to prevail in stonewalling anything from their adversaries in either the House or the Senate.

  6. bevin says:

    “Why Does France Get Publicly-Reported Phone Calls?”
    Because Hollande is the current Tony Blair. This is the guy who got the Socialist Party nod when Dominique Strauss Kahn dropped out of the (front) running.

  7. C says:

    “Why Does France Get Publicly-Reported Phone Calls?”

    I suspect it may be because of this:
    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/04/france-electronic-spying-operation-nsa

    Given that French “authorities” spy on themselves as much as we spy on them, and do so for similar reasons, it is more likely that any public “dialogue” between Obama and Hollande will end amicably. Both are morally compromised and neither one can really take the high road thus they can both do some nice Kabuki and perhaps even hope that this makes people focus on this and stop asking nasty questions about our spying on Brazil, Mexico, [Insert name here]…

    As an aside I suspect that the Mexico spying is going to be the most problematic. After all if we really have turned the full force of the NSA on our next-door neighbor and we still cannot stop or even slow the flood of drugs across the border or the rise of ultra-powerful cartels like the Zetas, who by the by we trained, then what is it for?

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