Ethics of Spying on One’s Friends: Angela Merkel’s Telephone

Covert information gathering about one state by another is not itself an act of hostility, and it can coexist with friendship between the states in question. Indeed, it can be predicated on friendship in the sense that the point of the information gathering can be to gauge the depth of a friendship and how warm it is currently. The fact that these things have to be gauged does not mean that countries are not allies after all, but rather that reading the dispositions and intentions of allies can be difficult. Another way of putting it is that in international relations it is hard to maintain useful, up-to-date knowledge of one's friends. After all, in this era of fragmented party politics and social media–fed movements, politics in a single country can be opaque even to that country's government.