|
"Don't worry EU, we are your friend" |
The U.S. National
Security Agency (NSA) has turned the European Union into a tapping
“bazaar” in order to spy on as many EU citizens as possible, NSA leaker
Edward Snowden said.
The NSA has been working with national security agencies in EU member
states to get access to as much data of EU citizens as possible,
Snowden said in a testimony sent to Members of the European Parliament
(MEPs)
published Friday March 7.
The European Parliament
had invited Snowden to provide testimony for an inquiry into the
electronic mass surveillance of EU citizens. That surveillance, often
instigated by the NSA but carried out with help of EU member states, is
quite extensive, he wrote.
The NSA has been pressuring EU member states to change their laws to
enable mass surveillance, according to Snowden. This is done through
NSA’s Foreign Affairs Division (FAD), he said, adding that lawyers from
the NSA and GCHQ work very hard “to search for loopholes in laws and
constitutional protections that they can use to justify indiscriminate,
dragnet surveillance operations that were at best unwittingly authorized
by lawmakers,” he said.
The deals between the
NSA and foreign partners are set up in such a way as to provide the NSA
with a means of monitoring a partner’s citizens without informing the
partner, and to provide the partner with a means of plausible
deniability, he said.
“The result is a European bazaar, where an EU member state like
Denmark may give the NSA access to a tapping center on the
(unenforceable) condition that NSA doesn’t search it for Danes, and
Germany may give the NSA access to another on the condition that it
doesn't search for Germans. Yet the two tapping sites may be two points
on the same cable, so the NSA simply captures the communications of the
German citizens as they transit Denmark, and the Danish citizens as they
transit Germany, all the while considering it entirely in accordance
with their agreements,” Snowden said.
Snowden, who said that he’s still seeking asylum in the EU, also provided solutions to solve the mass surveillance problem.
It is easy to make mass surveillance more expensive through changes
in technical standards, he said. “Pervasive, end-to-end encryption can
quickly make indiscriminate surveillance impossible on a cost effective
basis,” he said, adding that the result is that governments are likely
to fall back to traditional, targeted surveillance founded upon an
individualized suspicion.
The European Parliament
is set to vote on a draft resolution on Wednesday March 12 that seeks to keep
data protection out of EU-U.S. trade talks. The MEPs want the EU to
suspend two deals with the U.S., one on exchanging banking data and the
other on the Safe Harbor privacy principles for U.S. firms holding
European data, as, they say, the fight against terrorism can never
justify secret and illegal mass surveillance.
The MEPs will also vote on a proposal for stronger safeguards for
data transfers to non-EU countries.
Wednesday’s vote could result in the
updating of 19-year-old data-protection laws. Under MEPs’ amendments,
companies breaking the rules would face fines of up to €100 million
(about $139 million), or up to 5 percent of their annual worldwide
turnover, whichever is greater, according to the Parliament
Read more: NSA created 'European bazaar' to spy on EU citizens, Snowden tells European Parliament | PCWorld