Gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail,” Henry Stimson, US secretary of state, sniffed in 1929 as he closed down his department’s code-cracking outfit. America did not have a national intelligence service until 1946, when the wartime Office of Strategic Services morphed into the Central Intelligence Agency. Today, the US has 16 agencies spying on literally everybody – including, apparently, the German chancellor.

1929年，美国国务卿亨利·斯廷森(Henry Stimson)关闭了国务院的密码破译处，他轻蔑地说道：“君子不读他人之信”。那时的美国没有国家情报部门，直至1946年，战时的战略情报局(Office of Strategic Services)演变为中央情报局(CIA)。如今，美国有16个机构对几乎所有人进行间谍活动，其中显然包括德国总理安格拉·默克尔(Angela Merkel)。

Naturally, Angela Merkel is not amused, and her minions are now running through the usual gamut of diplomatic displeasure. The US ambassador has been upbraided for “totally unacceptable practices”. Two days earlier the French huffed and puffed about “completely unacceptable” US behaviour. According to Le Monde, the National Security Agency had scanned 62m French “telephone records” in a four-week period at the turn of this year.

默克尔自然感到不快，她的下属目前正在通过正常的外交渠道表达不满。美国大使已经因为这种“完全不可接受的行为”遭到谴责。两天前，法国怒气冲冲地表示美国的行为“完全不可接受”。根据法国《世界报》(Le Monde)的报道，美国国家安全局(National Security Agency)在今年初的四周时间里监听了法国公民的6200万个“电话记录”。

Do they protest too much? Helmut Schmidt, German chancellor from 1974 to 1982, likes to quip that Washington listened in on every one of his telephone conversations. Ms Merkel may be an old target, too; NSA records apparently contain a mobile phone number the chancellor abandoned years ago.

他们的抗议过分吗？从1974年到1982年担任德国总理的赫尔穆特·施密特(Helmut Schmidt)喜欢调侃说，华盛顿窃听他的所有的电话通话。默克尔也可能早就成为美国监听的目标。美国国家安全局的电话记录里显然包括默克尔多年前就停用的手机号码。

What about France, the nation that invented raison d’état? The Direction Générale de la Securité Extérieure does what the NSA does: spying on its citizens and their contacts abroad. The French surveillance system, as Le Monde has noted, is “run at the margins of legality”. Data are stored for an “indeterminate period”. Sheepishly obfuscating, Jean-Marc Ayrault, the prime minister, called this report “not exact”.

发明“国家利益”一词的法国情况如何？美国国家安全局做的事情，法国对外安全总局(DGSE)也在做：监控国外的法国公民以及他们的关系网。正如《世界报》所指出的那样，法国的监视体系“游走在合法性的边缘”。数据储存“期限不透明”。对此，法国总理让-马克·埃罗(Jean-Marc Ayrault)尴尬而闪烁其词地表示，该报道“不准确”。

Across the Channel, Her Majesty’s GCHQ runs the Tempora program, presumably with a better yield as London is an internet traffic hub.

在英吉利海峡对岸，英国女王陛下的政府通信总部(GCHQ)运行着Tempora项目，这里想必有着更好的监听成果，因为伦敦是一个互联网流量枢纽。

Which leaves the Germans, who can claim greater virtue because they did not take their espionage operations global after the cold war, choosing instead to cash in on their peace dividends. In the past the Bundesnachrichtendienst had a corner on the Warsaw Pact, both in terms of “humint” – human intelligence, or real-life snooping – and electronic and telephonic surveillance. Today, the BND does what everybody else does, though on a more modest scale. While France has listening posts all over the country, the Germans rely on a vast array of spherical antennas inherited from the US near the Bavarian town of Bad Aibling. German intelligence uses them to monitor electronic traffic coming into and out of the country. And why not unearth what homegrown terrorists might be cooking up with their comrades in Afghanistan or Pakistan?

只有德国人可以宣称更高尚一些，因为他们在冷战后没有在全球搞间谍活动，而是选择利用“和平红利”。过去，无论是“人工情报”（即现实生活中的侦察活动）还是电子和电话窃听，德国联邦情报局(Bundesnachrichtendienst)针对华约(Warsaw Pact)的情报收集工作都很出色。现在，德国联邦情报局也在做各国情报机构所做的事情，只是规模要小得多。法国在全国各地建有监听站，德国则依靠美国在巴伐利亚州的巴德艾布林格附近留下的庞大的球形天线阵。德国情报部门使用这些天线截获进出该国的电子信息。为什么不侦察本土恐怖分子和他们在阿富汗或巴基斯坦的同伙在策划什么阴谋呢？

The difference is history. Sensitive to their totalitarian past – the Gestapo, the security service of the SS and the East German Stasi – German leaders have kept their spy services at arm’s length. Privacy laws and curbs on data gathering are stricter than in Britain and France. When Le Monde broke the DGSE story, it opined that the snooping was “outside all serious control”.

差别在于历史。出于对极权主义历史——纳粹党卫军的安全部门盖世太保(Gestapo)以及东德的国家安全部(Stasi)——的敏感，德国领导人一直与情报机构保持距离。德国的隐私法和数据收集限制比英法更严厉。在曝光法国对外安全总局的监听活动时，《世界报》评论称，它“超出了所有认真的控制”。

Applied to the NSA, that phrase would be a sublime understatement. The NSA is simply running amok – on the basis of “we do because we can”. And because the powerful Senate intelligence committee has only barely begun to consider reining in an ultra-secret agency that is also known as “Never Say Anything”.

这句话若用来形容美国国家安全局则有轻描淡写之嫌。美国国家安全局简直疯了，其信念是“我们这样做是因为我们有本事这样做”，同时也是因为强势的参议院情报委员会(Senate Intelligence Committee)只是刚刚开始考虑约束这个绝密的机构。美国国安局的缩写NSA也被称为代表“永不说出任何东西”(Never Say Anything)。

Ms Merkel’s BlackBerry is just a tiny drop in the NSA’s ocean. Maybe President Barack Obama will apologise, but who will say mea culpa to 320m Americans who are the victims of the NSA’s systematic assault on their constitutionally mandated privacy? In the name of “national security”, the agency has amassed what yesterday’s secret police could not even dream up. The NSA is reportedly busily building a metadata repository capable of sucking in 20bn “record events” daily and passing the goods to analysts.

默克尔的黑莓手机只是美国国家安全局庞大监听活动的小小一环。美国总统巴拉克·奥巴马(Barack Obama)或许会道歉，但谁会向3.2亿美国人认错呢？他们受美国宪法保护的隐私遭到国家安全局的制度化侵犯。美国国家安全局以“国家安全”为名义，收集当年的秘密警察做梦都想不到的海量信息。有报道称，美国国家安全局正忙着建设一个庞大数据库，每日吸纳200亿个“记录事件”的元数据，并把这些数据传递给情报分析人员。

The Germans and French will moan: “How can you do this to your friends?” They can threaten to ditch plans for a transatlantic free trade zone, as trumpeted by the leader of Germany’s Social Democrats.

德国人和法国人将会抱怨：“你们怎么能这样对待你们的朋友？”就像德国社民党领导人宣称的那样，他们可能威胁退出跨大西洋自由贸易区计划。

But the real battle – the NSA’s war against sacred civil rights – will have to be won in Congress. Ms Merkel would do better to call Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate intelligence committee, than chastise the US ambassador. When Americans see the NSA as a threat to their own freedoms, they will act to leash it.

但真正的战争——美国国家安全局与公民神圣权利之间的战争——只能在美国国会赢得。默克尔打电话给参议院情报委员会主席黛安·范斯坦(Dianne Feinstein)将比谴责美国大使更有效。当美国人认为国家安全局威胁到他们自己的自由时，他们将采取行动管束这个机构。

Meanwhile, let us be realistic. Spying is the world’s second-oldest profession. States spy on enemies – and on friends.?How does one contain such threats? Not by whining.

与此同时，让我们现实一些吧。间谍活动是世界上第二古老的行业。国家对敌人（以及朋友）进行间谍活动。人们怎么才能遏制此类威胁？肯定不能靠抱怨。

Better to remember the rules: good counter-intelligence is more effective than sulky pouting; the best defence is offence – if you, my good friend, spy on me, I spy on you; and most important: do not get caught.

最好记住以下规则：卓越的反间谍工作比愠怒更有效；最好的防守是进攻——如果你，我的好朋友，对我搞间谍活动，那么我就对你搞间谍活动；最重要的是：别被抓住把柄。

German virtue also reflects meagre means. Flying with Ms Merkel in her small Challenger jet a few years back, I asked: “Where is your secure communications?” She grinned: “Over there, by the porthole,” pointing to a run-of-the-mill telephone set. Berlin has a long way to go in emulating its fabled second world war Abwehr.

德国的高尚也反映出该国手段有限。几年前与默克尔一起乘坐她的Challenger小型喷气飞机时，我问道：“你的保密通信设备在哪里？”她笑了笑说道：“就在那儿，窗边”，她指着一部陈旧的电话机。要赶上二战时期具有传奇色彩的德国军事情报机构Abwehr，柏林还有很长的路要走。

The writer is editor of Die Zeit and a fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University

本文作者是德国《时代周报》(Die Zeit)总编辑，斯坦福大学(Stanford University)胡佛研究所(Hoover Institution)研究员