US now spying on German govt. ministers
Iran Press TV
Sun Feb 23, 2014 3:23PM GMT
The US National Security Agency (NSA) has stepped up its espionage activities against senior government officials in Germany.
According to German newspaper Bild am Sonntag, the NSA expanded its spying operations on German officials after it had been ordered by US President Barack Obama to stop its spying on Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The paper said it has obtained the information from a high-ranking NSA employee in Germany. Interior Minister Thomas de Maizierem who is a confidant of Merkel is said to be among the new targets of spying.
The highly-circulated paper also reported that the NSA is monitoring 320 people in Germany which include mostly politicians but also business leaders.
Last year's revelations about mass US spying, in particular on Merkel's mobile phone, shocked Germans and sparked one of the most serious disputes between the two allies.
"We have had the order not to miss out on any information now that we are no longer able to monitor the chancellor's communication directly," it quoted the NSA employee as saying.
To calm the anger over US massive spying abroad, President Obama in January banned US eavesdropping on the leaders of close friends and allies of Washington.
Snooping on people's private affairs is a very sensitive and politically charged issue in Germany due to Germans experiences in the Nazi era and in Communist East Germany, when the Stasi, the secret government police, built up a massive surveillance network by secretly watching ordinary people and collected information about them for the government.
Germans are especially sensitive about snooping due to their experiences in the Nazi era and in Communist East Germany, when the Stasi secret police built up a massive surveillance network.
Berlin has been pushing for a 'no-spy' deal with Washington. The effort has been in vain. After the spying scandal, Merkel has been backing calls for European internet services that are walled off from the US.
According to the Financial Times, some tech experts have warned that proposals to build alternative networks in Europe and force internet companies to store data about Europeans locally fail to take account of how the internet operates, or the continued legal obligation of American companies to turn information over to the NSA no matter where it is stored.
In January 2014, an independent US privacy watchdog, The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, ruled that NSA's bulk collection of telephone data was illegal. It advised that the program should end adding that it has had only "minimal" gains in preventing terrorism.
DDB/DDB
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