Five Eyes' Hell in Brussels

Excerpt from The War Diary of ISAF's Media Operations Centre NATO Headquarters Blvd Leopold III 1110 Brussels, Belgium. Wednesday, July 17, 2013 9:30 AM Au Repos de la Montagne, Montagne de Saint-Job 39. Coffee en route to work. There are days when Strategic Communication seems futile. Further hideous developments after revelations from the Snowden person.  Urgent phone call from Chief to co-ordinate Messaging. Meeting in the wine cellar of Le Wine Bar du Sablon, Rue Haute 198.  Hotel Metropole out because of massive security leak to NSA at last meeting.  Can't understand it.  11:00 AM in wine cellar.  Cozy bunker-like atmosphere.  Chief holding up well with champagne, it worked for Churchill. Apparently all NATO members have been bugging all of the other NATO members.  Quelle surprise.  Chief says Anglosphere has had lead in total hoovering of all the information in the world and storing it in a new bunker in Utah.  Never been to Utah.  Question is, how do we present a united front, given that nobody in NATO now trusts anybody else in NATO.  I suggest we compare it to a zoo at feeding time: everybody's in the same place but the only constant is the zoo-keepers.  Message rejected as being completely accurate. 1:00 PM.  Lunch served, followed by food. Excellent metaphor.  Irony lost on Chief. So much for English literature.  Maybe it doesn't work in French.  3:00 PM Coffee.  It's crunch time.  How in fact can we explain why it's essential for the NSA and its Five Eyes vassals to collect all the world's haystacks so as to keep citizens of NATO safe from Terrorism and other miscellaneous undesirable things by finding the needles in the haystacks at a later date when we have more time after a fresh disaster of some sort tells us where to look.  This will allow everybody to increase the power and reach of the secret agencies that have conspicuously failed to save anybody from anything despite the expenditure of about a femtillion dollars and/or Euros, and construct new cyber defences against dangerous Terrorists and of course, each other. The Chinese are a whole other story. 5:00 PM  Cocktails. Strategy hammered out. It was a very hammered strategy.  Adopted the tried and true plan of ignoring all of this mess as if it didn't exist, just like the last ISAF Commander's indiscretions didn't exist - forget his name for the moment - and concentrate on the latest positive news from Afghanistan. 7:00 Few staff still standing.  A day well spent.