Still to recover from the Edward Snowden jolt, the United States was on Sunday faced with more embarrassment and possibly strained relations with its closest of allies as a leading German weekly reported that Washington bugged European Union offices and accessed EU computer networks.
Der Spiegel also reported that the US National Security Agency (NSA) has been involved in monitoring as many as 500 million phone calls, emails and text messages in Germany every month.Reacting sharply to the disclosures, leaders of the European Union demanded a full and speedy explanation, but there was no immediate public response from Washington.
“I am deeply worried and shocked about the allegations,” European Parliament President Martin Schulz said in a statement, adding: “If the allegations prove to be true, it would be an extremely serious matter which will have a severe impact on EU-US relations.” He demanded a full and speedy explanation from the US.
“If the media reports are accurate, it is reminiscent of actions among enemies during the Cold War,” Germany’s Justice Minister Sabine leutheusser-Schnarrenberger commented, noting: “It’s beyond our imagination that our friends in the US consider the Europeans as enemies.”
The new revelations came even as US Vice President Joe Biden spoke with Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, urging him to turn down the asylum request from Snowden, who remains holed up in Moscow airport. Desperate to get the whistleblower back on American soil, US officials are continuing their engagement with Russian counterparts.
On its website, Der Spiegel reported that one document, dated September 2010 and classified as “strictly confidential”, described how the NSA installed microphones at EU’s mission in Washington and infiltrated its computer network, giving the agency access to emails and internal documents.The report also said that the spying extended to the 27-nation EU’s headquarters in Brussels, with the EU delegation at the UN also subject to similar surveillance.
Following the report, the European Commission said in a statement in Brussels: “We have immediately been in contact with the US authorities in Washington DC 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.”
Snowden had exposed NSA’s surveillance both within and outside the US, Der Spiegel said that Germany has been “a significant target of the NSA’s global surveillance programme, with some 500 million communication connections being monitored every month.”The documents show that the NSA is more active in Germany than in any other country in the European Union,” it went on to say.
During his recent visit to Germany, President Barack Obama had sought to assure an audience that America was not indiscriminately “rifling” through the emails of ordinary European citizens, maintaining that NSA’s surveillance programmes were a “circumscribed” system that had helped avert terrorist threats in America, Germany, and elsewhere.
On Vice President Biden’s telephone talk with Ecuador’s President Correa, too, no details were immediately forthcoming from the US government, except to confirm the talk. But in Quito, Correa spoke of a “friendly and very cordial” conversation, during which he reportedly told Biden that Ecuador can’t consider the asylum request until Snowden is on Ecuadorean soil.
“The moment that he arrives, if he arrives, the first thing is we’ll ask the opinion of the United States, as we did in the (Wikileaks’ Julian) Assange case with England,” Correa was quoted as saying, adding: “But the decision is ours to make.”