Reports in Der Spiegel that US agencies bugged European council building 'reminiscent of cold war', says German minister
The prospects for a new trade pact between the US and the
European Union
worth hundreds of billions have suffered a severe setback following
allegations that Washington bugged key EU offices and intercepted
phonecalls and emails from top officials.
The latest reports of
NSA snooping on
Europe – and on
Germany
in particular – went well beyond previous revelations of electronic
spying said to be focused on identifying suspected terrorists,
extremists and organised criminals.
The German publication
Der Spiegel reported that it had seen documents and slides from the whistleblower
Edward Snowden
indicating that US agencies bugged the offices of the EU in Washington
and at the United Nations in New York. They are also accused of
directing an operation from Nato headquarters in Brussels to infiltrate
the telephone and email networks at the EU's Justus Lipsius building in
the Belgian capital, the venue for EU summits and home of the European
council.
Without citing sources, the magazine reported that more
than five years ago security officers at the EU had noticed several
missed calls apparently targeting the remote maintenance system in the
building that were traced to offices within the Nato compound in Brussels.
The
impact of the Der Spiegel allegations may be felt more keenly in
Germany than in Brussels. The magazine said Germany was the foremost
target for the US surveillance programmes, categorising Washington's key
European ally alongside China, Iraq or Saudi Arabia in the intensity of
the electronic snooping.
Germany's justice minister, Sabine
Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, called for an explanation from the US
authorities. "If the media reports are true, it is reminiscent of the
actions of enemies during the cold war," she was quoted as saying in the
German newspaper Bild. "It is beyond imagination that our friends in
the US view Europeans as the enemy."
France later also asked the
US authorities for an explanation. France's foreign minister, Laurent
Fabius, said: "These acts, if confirmed, would be completely
unacceptable.
"We expect the American authorities to answer the
legitimate concerns raised by these press revelations as quickly as
possible.".
Washington and Brussels are scheduled to open
ambitious free trade talks next week following years of arduous
preparation. Senior officials in Brussels are worried that the talks
would be overshadowed by the latest disclosures of US spying on its
closest allies.
"Obviously we will need to see what is the impact
on the trade talks," said a senior official in Brussels. A second senior
official said the allegations would cause a furore in the European
parliament and could then hamper relations with the US.
Robert Madelin, one of Britain's most senior officials in the
European commission, tweeted that EU trade negotiators always operated on the assumption that their communications were listened to.
A
spokesman for the European commission said: "We have immediately been
in contact with the US authorities in Washington and in Brussels and
have confronted them with the press reports. They have told us they are
checking on the accuracy of the information released yesterday and will
come back to us."
There were calls from MEPs for Herman Van
Rompuy, the president of the European council – who has his office in
the building allegedly targeted by the US – and José Manuel Barroso, the
president of the European commission, to urgently appear before the
chamber to explain what steps they were taking in response to the
growing body of evidence of US and British electronic surveillance of
Europe through the and operations.
Guy
Verhofstadt, the former Belgian prime minister and leader of the
liberals in the European parliament, said: "This is absolutely
unacceptable and must be stopped immediately. The American data
collection mania has achieved another quality by spying on EU officials
and their meetings. Our trust is at stake."
Luxembourg's foreign
minister, Jean Asselborn, told Der Spiegel: "If these reports are true,
it's disgusting." Asselborn called for guarantees from the very highest
level of the US government that the snooping and spying is immediately
halted.
Martin Schulz, the head of the European parliament, said:
"I am deeply worried and shocked about the allegations of US authorities
spying on EU offices. If the allegations prove to be true, it would be
an extremely serious matter which will have a severe impact on EU-US
relations.
"On behalf of the European parliament, I demand full
clarification and require further information speedily from the US
authorities with regard to these allegations."
There were also
calls for John Kerry, the US secretary of state, to make a detour to
Brussels on his way from his current trip to the Middle East, to explain
US activities.
"We need to get clarifications and transparency at
the highest level," said Marietje Schaake, a Dutch liberal MEP. "Kerry
should come to Brussels on his way back from the Middle East. This is
essential for the transatlantic alliance. The US can only lead by
example, and should uphold the freedoms it claims to protect against
attacks from the outside. Instead we see erosion of freedoms, checks and
balances, from within."
Within senior circles in Brussels,
however, it has long been assumed that the Americans were listening to
or seeking to monitor EU electronic traffic.
"There's a certain
schadenfreude here that we're important enough to be spied on," said one
of the officials. "This was bound to come out one day. And I wouldn't
be surprised if some of our member states were not doing the same to the
Americans."
The documents suggesting the clandestine bugging operations were from September 2010, Der Spiegel said.
A
former senior official in Brussels maintained that EU phone and
computer systems were almost totally secure but that no system could be
immune to persistent high-quality penetration operations.
"I have
always assumed that anyone with a decent agency was listening, hacking
if they could be bothered," he said. "It doesn't bother me much.
Sometimes it's a form of communication."
Der Spiegel quoted the
Snowden documents as revealing that the US taps half a billion phone
calls, emails and text messages in Germany a month. "We can attack the
signals of most foreign third-class partners, and we do it too," Der
Spiegel quoted a passage in the document as saying.
On an average day, the
monitored about 20m German phone connections and 10m internet datasets,
rising to 60m phone connections on busy days, the report said.
Officials
in Brussels said this reflected Germany's weight in the EU and probably
also entailed elements of industrial and trade
espionage.
"The Americans are more interested in what governments think than the
European commission. And they make take the view that Germany determines
European policy," said one of the senior officials.
Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German Green party MEP and a specialist in
data protection,
told the Guardian the revelations were outrageous. "It's not about
political answers now, but rule of law, fundamental constitutional
principles and rights of European citizens," he said.
"We now need
a debate on surveillance measures as a whole looking at underlying
technical agreements. I think what we can do as European politicians now
is to protect the rights of citizens and their rights to control their
own personal data."
Talking about the 's
classification of Germany as a "third-class" partner, Albrecht said it
was not helping to build the trust of Germans or other Europeans. "It is
destroying trust and to rebuild that, [the US] will need to take real
action on legislation," he said.
Meanwhile, it has emerged that at least six European member states have shared personal communications data with the , according to declassified US intelligence reports and EU parliamentary documents.
The
documents, seen by the Observer, show that – in addition to the UK –
Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy have all had
formal agreements to provide communications data to the US. They state
that the EU countries have had "second and third party status" under
decades-old signal intelligence (Sigint) agreements that compel them to
hand over data which, in later years, experts believe, has come to
include mobile phone and internet data.
Under the international
intelligence agreements, nations are categorised by the US according to
their trust level. The US is defined as 'first party' while the UK,
Canada, Australia and New Zealand enjoy 'second party' trusted
relationships. Countries such as Germany and France have 'third party',
or less trusted, relationships.
The data-sharing was set out under
a 1955 UK-USA agreement that provided a legal framework for
intelligence-sharing that has continued.
It stipulates: "In
accordance with these arrangements, each party will continue to make
available to the other, continuously, and without request, all raw
traffic, COMINT (communications intelligence) end-product and technical
material acquired or produced, and all pertinent information concerning
its activities, priorities and facilities."
The agreement goes on
to explain how it can be extended to incorporate similar agreements with
third party countries, providing both the UK and the US agree.
Under
the third party data-sharing agreements each country was given a
codename. Denmark was known as Dynamo while Germany was referred to as
Richter. The agreements were of strategic importance to the during the cold war.
However, Simon Davies, an intelligence expert and project director at the London School of Economics who writes the
Privacy Surgeon blog, suggested the 's role had been given a sharper focus following amendments to the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ().
In an interview published in full last night on Davies' blog, former director General Michael Hayden said: "The changes made to in 2008 were far more dramatic – far more far-reaching than anything President Bush authorised me to do."
Davies told the Observer that confirmation of the secret agreements showed there was a need for the EU to investigate.
"It's
clear that the European parliament must intervene at this point through
a public inquiry," Davies said. "MEPs should put the interests of their
citizens above party politics and create meaningful reforms."
The
covert data-sharing relationship between leading European countries and
the US was first outlined in a 2001 report by the European parliament.
The
report stated: "Germany and the United Kingdom are called upon to make
the authorisation of further communications interception operations by
US intelligence services on their territory conditional on their
compliance with the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights)."
