U.S. President Barack Obama must wish digital communications were never invented. In addition to the embarrassing healthcare.gov mess, he has to handle phone calls from irate European allies who see U.S. electronic spying on their turf as a breach of trust. Comical as such diplomatic tussles may seem, they carry a very real threat for U.S. Internet companies serving European markets.
There was not much Obama could tell a bristling French President Francois Hollande or an outraged German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The French and German sides reported the calls differently than did the White House. They stressed their respective leaders' tough questions, while the U.S. played up Obama's soothing but noncommittal responses. He told Hollande that some of the news media reports on U.S. electronic surveillance in France contained unspecified distorted information and stopped short of denying that the National Security Agency ever tapped Merkel's phone, saying only that it was not doing so now and had no such plans for the future.
Overall, the U.S. stance seems to be that the Europeans should calm down and treat U.S. spying as mundane. As National Security Council Spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden put it, "As a matter of policy we have made clear that the United States gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations."
There is a rationale behind telling European leaders "OK, we're friends, but our intelligence services do what they have to do, so please shut up about it already." France and Germany will not break up their partnership with the U.S. to embrace Russia or China. So Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who caused all the unpleasantness, may not have done much damage to the U.S. political relationship with the European Union. His revelations, however, may force U.S. companies like Google and Facebook to change the way they operate in Europe and perhaps globally.