It has become painfully clear that what the National Security Agency lacks, above all, is discretion. That probably occurred to President Obama on Wednesday, when he got on the line with Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, who was calling with what was apparently unmitigated anger to ask why the N.S.A. was monitoring her cell phone. Obama told her that it isn’t, or won’t—a “wasn’t” seems to have been missing—but Merkel’s government had seen enough, in N.S.A. documents obtained by the German news magazine Der Spiegel, to know what it thought. (According to Reuters, one listed her mobile phone number.) Obama had a similar call with France’s François Hollande, and may have about thirty-three more, based on the latest Guardian report on the number of heads of state whose phones it tracked. But the N.S.A.’s wildly indiscreet character had already come well into the light in the first documents leaked, this summer, by Edward Snowden, about its mass, often indiscriminate collection of American telephone and Web communications. The Agency moves broadly and clumsily; it’s greedy in a way that is unhealthy; it tells itself that rules can mean what it wants them to mean; it is a poor judge of people; it has no real discernment—and that, for a spy agency, may be the worst part of all.

Our current and recent intelligence leaders seem determined to reinforce this judgment. On Thursday, Michael Hayden, the former director of the N.S.A., talking on his cell phone on Amtrak’s Acela, gave anonymous quotes to various reporters loudly enough for a fellow passenger named Tom Matzzie to hear and live-tweet it. The same day, the Pentagon posted a video interview with Hayden’s successor, General Keith Alexander, in which he awkwardly tried to explain that the operations Snowden revealed “are not spying programs” and dismissed privacy concerns this way:

It’s like when you were younger—well, this is for boys—you know, when you’re younger you say, “I don’t want to take a bath.” You say, “No, I’ll never to take a bath.” Why would you want to take a bath, well, you have to take a bath, clean, da da, da. You say, “But isn’t there a better way?” So we had to take baths, right. Or showers.

So is reading e-mails the bath and metadata collection the shower? And girls are supposedly O.K. with both? More mysteriously, why is Alexander comparing people who question his agency’s work to dirty children? Alexander then went on to say that leakers might have blood on their hands, and, as Politico noted, accused newspapers of “selling” Snowden’s documents. He said that anyone who thought we were, for example, spying on French phone calls en masse, should remember that French people spoke French and that it would take a long time to listen to them all.

Aren’t spy agencies meant to be indiscreet—to look at hidden things, wherever they are, and never mind politeness? Isn’t that what spies do? Not exactly, or not unless we are talking about the sort of Stasi-like secret service whose role is as much or more to intimidate and stifle discourse as to actually learn anything. Merkel, who grew up in the former East Germany and exposed herself by taking part in the protests that brought that regime down, may have had that sort of spying in mind. “Spying on friends—that’s not how it goes,” Merkel said. Her spokesperson called it a “a grave breach of trust.”

Of course the United States gathers intelligence on Germany; of course it must. But that does not mean that we have a free pass to sweep up every last bit of data, from whatever source, and expect that there won’t be consequences. We don’t send agents to lurk behind every foreigner we see, no matter what we might learn. (And it’s worth imagining the reaction if the Germans were monitoring Obama’s phone.) If we grant ourselves the prerogative to listen in on foreign leaders, then we can’t really mind if they decide they have the right to be outraged about it—and to share less information voluntarily, to be less good friends themselves. That may have begun: leaders at an E.U. summit Friday issued a statement saying that “a lack of trust could prejudice the necessary cooperation in the field of intelligence-gathering.”

The Obama Administration may have belatedly realized this (thanks, as with many recent necessary conversations, to the Snowden leaks). In an op-ed in USA Today, Lisa Monaco, the White House counterterrorism adviser, wrote that the President “has directed us to review our surveillance capabilities, including with respect to our foreign partners. We want to ensure we are collecting information because we need it and not just because we can.”

The Guardian’s new document is a memo suggesting that U.S. officials, the Agency’s “customers,” might “be willing to share their ‘Rolodexes’ or phone lists with NSA as potential sources of intelligence” on foreign officials, adding that the unit involved “welcomes such information!” Someone gave them two hundred numbers. The cleverness ends there: according to the memo, the result was “little reportable intelligence.”

The N.S.A.’s mandate is confined to gathering foreign intelligence; it is supposed to look away from Americans. That doesn’t mean it gets to stop thinking sensibly whenever it crosses a border. (Or ignore the way that pulling Internet traffic from, say, a transatlantic cable elides the difference.) Domestically, the Snowden papers show the N.S.A. being careless with our civil rights; internationally, they reveal that the Agency has recklessly disregarded the effect its work might have on diplomatic relations and the view of America in the world. Those are important to our safety, too.

The Germans are not being crazy. And their reaction does not seem to just be for show. Der Spiegel had—carefully, judiciously—gone to the Merkel government for comment before publishing a story about the phone monitoring. Far from asking the reporters to be quiet, or staying quiet themselves, officials immediately issued their own outraged statement. Many Germans had been bothered by Merkel’s relative quiescence about earlier rounds of N.S.A. revelations, and noted the change of tone. Now that she herself was a target, the Chancellor had no intention of being discreet.

Photograph by Geert Vanden Wijngaert/AP.

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