> As a non-American, I see him as a hero but I am frankly more outraged by the revelations of how complicit European governments have been, and how unwilling the press have been to follow it up.
I agree, it's terribly depressing. There is this narrative of "the NSA is spying on us" when Europeans should wake up and realize that their domestic security service are doing exactly the same, either secretly (France, UK...) or openly (Sweden). But considering how both the moderate right and the moderate left have been perfectly accommodating about it, people, provided they are even aware of it, are left with little legal recourse.
I'm Norwegian, and the most horrifying demonstration of how weak the press is we got when one of the major newspapers (Dagbladet) published claims that the Norwegian intelligence services (without specifying which one - there are 3) handed over millions of call records per months to the NSA (EDIT: specifically claiming this was about surveillance in Norway).
The response was downright scary:
All the three agencies denies that there was any surveillance of Norwegians in Norway, as one would expect them to do.
But the agency responsible for foreign military surveillance "admitted" to handing the NSA tens of millions of call records from conflict areas. Now, Norway is a small country, with limited military involvements: The only areas we are active in are areas where the US is active too. They wanted us to believe that Norway has a foreign surveillance capability where we are able to collect that kind of call volume in places like Afghanistan, that the NSA does not already have.
If we do, that too should be news, and should have led to further reports and political questions raised. And it should have led to questions over how, then, the domestic intelligence couldn't make do with far less money, as military intelligence apparently manages to do a massive amount of surveillance in war zones on what suddenly looks like a shoestring budget... But the press response was to parrot what military intelligence said.
They held a press conference - something they hardly ever do - and made what appeared to be revelations about operational ability - something they never do - and courted media all day.
Meanwhile, the Police Security Service, which in the past have been caught red-handed carrying out substantial illegal surveillance, kept extremely low profile despite the fact that the allegations made by the newspapers (and reiterated in a piece by Greenwald) was that this was about surveillance in Norway which means it is the Police Security Service's "table". They were able to get away with a denial through a press contact and were then out of the news picture with no further questioning.
Apparently not a single news source saw it as odd enough to question why military intelligence was all over the news and why they might want to push for further responses from the people actually responsible for surveillance in Norway. The people who (under their previous name - the Police Surveillance Service) not only spend decades carrying illegally political surveillance of the Norwegian left, but were even caught carrying out illegal surveillance of the member of parliament who led the parliamentary commission investigating their illegal surveillance while he was investigating them.
The press did not apply any pressure at all. Not publicly at least. They just immediately accepted the claims from military intelligence. Dagbladet folded immediately and backtracked. And the major papers subjected their online forums to the harshest moderation I've ever seen in Norwegian papers.
Frankly, no event in Norwegian politics in the last 30 years have scared me more than how that was treated: Whether or not Dagbladet's claims were true or not, it demonstrated either a scary ability of the establishment to shut down any kind of real journalism around it, or a scary level of apathy and disinterest. I'm not sure which is worse.
You don't say. Being a French expat in DK, I found the apathy of the French public in answer to allegations of internal, warrantless surveillance appalling. Apparently, gay marriage is more important. The Danish government has kept mum about the subject, as far as I know, and I haven't heard anything in the Snowden documents concerning DK, but considering how eagerly the Conservatives previously in power went to look for WMDs in Iraq, I fully expect PET to be carrying out the same operations.
Regarding the press and the government, what are their usual working relationship? My impression here is that Danish people are much less cynical about the government than the French are. Combined with a culture of consensus-seeking, this could lead to the press not being as incisive as it could be (though on the other hand, it's apparently possible for politicians to be evicted over scandals that would make the French barely bat an eyelid).
I agree, it's terribly depressing. There is this narrative of "the NSA is spying on us" when Europeans should wake up and realize that their domestic security service are doing exactly the same, either secretly (France, UK...) or openly (Sweden). But considering how both the moderate right and the moderate left have been perfectly accommodating about it, people, provided they are even aware of it, are left with little legal recourse.