The White House said last week that the United States “is not monitoring and will not monitor” Merkel’s communications, but did not deny that the Chancellor may have been spied on in the past.
The recent revelations by whistle blower Ed Snowden have sparked fire between governments, as according to Snowden’s information, the US has gone too far, breaking every moral just to spy on other countries. The UN, Germany and Brazil, along with others, are furious about the facts; they are demanding answers and a thorough change in the States’ foreign policy.
The documents show that the NSA considered tracking targets using cellphone location data, they also show that Britain’s surveillance agency is operating a network of “electronic spy posts” from within a stone’s throw of the Bundestag and the German Chancellor’s office.
According to the report, Germany, France, Spain, and Sweden have also been engaging in mass wiretapping of Internet communications and telephone calls over the past five years and have been passing that information to the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).
The information is retrieved through “direct taps into fiber optic cables and the development of covert relationships with telecommunications companies.”
Merkel’s top foreign affairs and intelligence advisers were in Washington on Wednesday to question American officials over the US spying in Germany after raising accusations that the US bugged her personal mobile phone.
The White House said last week that the United States “is not monitoring and will not monitor” Merkel’s communications, but did not deny that the Chancellor may have been spied on in the past.
President Barack Obama has heavily faced international criticism and recently ordered the NSA to stop spying on the UN headquarters in New York as part of a revision of the US electronic surveillance, also he is considering a ban on US eavesdropping on leaders of allied nations.
Diplomats from Germany and Brazil, a few days back, began circulating a draft resolution calling on the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to investigate “the protection of the right to privacy in the context of domestic and extraterritorial, including massive, surveillance of communications, their interception and collection of personal data.”
Both the countries’ delegations have held meetings with other European and Latin American countries, so far securing initial interest from France, Cuba, Mexico and Venezuela as possible cosponsors of the resolution.
Over the next two years, the UN’s Human Rights Chief should present a report each year, “identifying and clarifying principles, standards and best practices on how to address security concerns” without violating international human rights laws, specifically monitoring “digital communications and the use of other intelligence technologies,” according to the text.
Though the resolutions adopted by the General Assembly are not binding, the Brazil-German proposal would provide a forum for dozens of countries to express discontent with the US surveillance program.
In response to the revelations, German officials said Monday that the US could lose access to an important law enforcement tool, used to track terrorist money flows. Other longtime allies have also expressed their displeasure about the US spying on their leaders.
As a possible leverage, the German authorities cited last week’s non-binding resolution by the European Parliament to suspend a post-9/11 agreement allowing the Americans access to bank transfer data to track the flow of terrorist money.
A top German official said Monday she believed the Americans were using the information to gather economic intelligence apart from terrorism and said the agreement, known as the SWIFT agreement, should be suspended.
Also, the German media speculated that the German government might seek to join an espionage alliance known as the “Five Eyes”, in which the United States and a group of English-speaking allies divide the world into eavesdropping target sectors and share the results. The “Five Eyes” partners are the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
