NSA spying row: bugging friends is unacceptable, warn Germans

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The leaders of Germany and France have rounded angrily on the US for the first time over spying claims, signalling that ambitious EU-US trade talks scheduled to open next week could become an early casualty of theburgeoning transatlantic espionage dispute.

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and French president, François Hollande, described the disclosures of massive US spying and snooping in Europe as unacceptable, with the Germans suggesting there had to be mutual trust if the trade talks were to go ahead in Washington on Monday.

Merkel delivered her severest warning yet on the National Security Agency debacle. “We are no longer in the cold war,” her spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said. “If it is confirmed that diplomatic representations of the European Union and individual European countries have been spied upon, we will clearly say that bugging friends is unacceptable.”

He said Berlin was keen on the trade talks with Washington, but qualified that support. “Mutual trust is necessary in order to come to an agreement.”

After the Guardian’s disclosure that US agencies were secretly bugging the French embassy in Washington and France’s office at the UN in New York, Hollande called for an immediate halt to the alleged spying.

“We cannot accept this kind of behaviour between partners and allies,” Hollande said. “We ask that this stop immediately.”

The Europeans received their first opportunity to demand answers from the top level of the Obama administration about the massive scale of US spying on its EU allies when Lady Ashton and John Kerry met in Brunei. The EU and US foreign policy chiefs met on the fringes of a meeting of EU, US and south-east Asian governments, giving the British peer a chance to air EU grievances over the disclosures in the Guardian. On Sunday she demanded prompt clarification from the Americans over the veracity of the media reports.

Kerry, the US secretary of state, delivered a low-key response to the growing European clamour for answers, saying the NSA activities were not unusual. “Every country in the world that is engaged in international affairs of national security undertakes lots of activities to protect its national security and all kinds of information contributes to that,” he said. “All I know is that is not unusual for lots of nations.”

A sense of naked outrage gathered momentum across Europe at the reports that US agencies were bugging and tapping EU offices in Washington and New York, as well as the embassies of several EU member states. The push for clear answers from the Americans threatened to derail long-awaited talks on a transatlantic free trade pact between the US and the EU to create the world’s biggest free-trade area.

“Washington is shooting itself in the foot,” said Germany’s conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. “Declaring the EU offices to be a legitimate attack target is more than the unfriendly act of a machine that knows no bounds and may be out of the control of politics and the courts.”

Martin Schulz, the president of the European parliament, likened the NSA to the Soviet-era KGB and indirectly suggested a delay in the talks.

Greens in the European parliament, as well as in France and Germany, called for the conference to be postponed pending an investigation of the allegations. They also called for the freezing of other data-sharing deals between the EU and the US, on air transport passengers and banking transactions, for example, and called for the NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, to be granted political asylum in Europe. French Greens asked Hollande to grant Snowden asylum in France.

Schulz said: “I feel treated as a European and a representative of a European institution like the representative of the enemy. Is this the basis for a constructive relationship on the basis of mutual trust? I think no.

“We are just starting negotiations on a free-trade agreement between the European Union and the United States. This is not the basis to build mutual trust, this is a contribution to build mutual mistrust and, therefore, I understand all those in Europe who think that we should first of all ask the Americans, secondly look to or listen to the justification and then take the necessary consequences.

“On the other hand, with this affair or not, the United States of America and Europeans remain … strategic allies. Therefore it is shocking that the United States take measures against their most important and nearest allies, comparable to measures taken in the past by the KGB, by the secret service of the Soviet Union.”

While the anger is broad and growing across Europe, it is particularly intense in Germany which, according to Snowden’s revelations, is by far the main target within the EU of the NSA’s Prism programme sweeping up metadata en masse, capturing and storing it.

Given the high sensitivity of data privacy issues in Germany, the scandal could test Merkel and force her on to the offensive against the Americans as she seeks to win a third term in general elections 11 weeks away.

 

The Guardian has the full article

(Photo: Wikipedia)

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