EDITORIAL
What's the etiquette for spying on friends?

What's odd about this week's drama in London is how little reverberation it's causing in Washington.

Katharine Gun, a translator at Britain's secret eavesdropping agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), had been facing two years in prison on a charge of violating the Official Secrets Act. But the moment she entered her innocent plea Wednesday, the government dropped its case.

Gun's case may be only the beginning of a larger scandal. A former British Cabinet minister now says that British spies have regularly bugged the office of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan.

Last year, as the United States and Britain prepared to invade Iraq, Gun came across an e-mail from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), asking GCHQ to mount a "surge" of spying against members of the U.N. Security Council whose votes would be crucial to passing a second resolution authorizing war.

Gun was outraged at what she considered an attempt to subvert the U.N. So she leaked the memo to the Observer newspaper, which then reported that the NSA stepped up eavesdropping on officials from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria, Guinea and Pakistan, all members of the Security Council at the time.

Gun was not about to go quietly. She claimed a defense of "necessity" — that her leak was required to prevent an illegal war.

What puzzles us is why there isn't even a slight hint of embarrassment in Washington. Perhaps it's naive to be surprised that we've been spying on friendly diplomats. But when we're caught red-handed, shouldn't we at least act a bit sheepish?

More to the point, Gun correctly saw that such bugging operations are contrary to international law and conventions, and a threat to the very legality that is the basis, in and between our Western democracies, of trust and justice.