I find it interesting that President Obama seeks to limit the growing anger in Europe over the Snowden revelations by stating that U.S. agencies were simply behaving the same way as intelligence organizations in the rest of the world.

This is true, of course, and most intelligence agencies cooperate with the United States and each other on common goals such as terrorism, money laundering, etc. In fact, we offer equipment and training to many countries’ law-enforcement agencies, which are often connected to their intelligence agencies.

So it is to our benefit overall that everyone is spying on everyone. As we all know, the cold war is long dead and capitalism reigns. Therefore, cooperation to maintain the status quo is paramount for world order.

What happens when a foreign country decides to monitor electronic conversations of U.S. citizens? What happens with the information? In fact, the easiest way for agencies in the United States to gather information on its owns citizens is to allow another country to do it for them. There isn’t a constitutional issue involved, less paperwork and no messy court review.

The United States fosters relationships with foreign government agencies that are capable of monitoring electronic communications, and we can take full advantage of the intelligence that is gathered. These countries are not subject to review by U.S. courts.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing if the foreign country isn’t directed by a U.S. agency to collect intelligence on U.S. citizens. But that is a big “if.” Who is ensuring that this relationship isn’t abused by our agencies? Believe me, this is very easy to orchestrate if everyone is on the same sheet of music.

Sadly, I have come to realize that our agencies do not have proper oversight. Time and again, we have senators and congressman dumbfounded by issues such as Snowden and the Prism program, and they act as though they didn’t have a clue it was possible. I think many of them don’t have a good understanding of the issues, and I believe they don’t want to. Politically, what you know can hurt you more than what you don’t.

Recently, over half of the senators elected to leave Washington early instead of attending a briefing with James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, Keith Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency, and others. How can we trust that our constitutional rights are protected when our representatives don’t take them seriously?

DANNY DALTON, an unenrolled candidate for U.S. Senate in 2012, is a former agent for the Drug Enforcement Agency, FBI and U.S. State Department. He lives in Brunswick.