Friends Don’t Let Friends Bug Phones

Outrage over U.S. wiretapping of Angela Merkel’s mobile phone has inspired two proposals worth considering. One is that the U.S. should quit spying on allied leaders. The second, floated by the German chancellor herself, is to add her country to the no-mutual-spying, intelligence sharing pact that the U.S. has had with its closest Anglophone allies since 1946.

Both of these ideas have the virtue of going beyond the inadequate response, “Everybody spies.” Neither of them, however, would be as easy to carry out as they might sound.