Tag: government spying
Germany Opens Criminal Probe Into U.S. Tapping Of Merkel’s Phone

Germany Opens Criminal Probe Into U.S. Tapping Of Merkel’s Phone

By Matthew Schofield, McClatchy Foreign Staff

BERLIN — Almost a year after news surfaced that the United States had been spying on German communications, Germany’s top prosecutor announced Wednesday that he has launched a criminal investigation into the tapping of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone.

“Let me be clear: Espionage is a crime in Germany regardless of whether those spying are friends or enemies,” Federal Public Prosecutor Harald Range said as he opened a news conference to announce the investigation, which he disclosed first during a closed session of the Parliament’s judicial committee.

Range’s decision — and his unusual candor in branding the surveillance of Merkel’s phone a crime — underscored just how raw German nerves remain over the revelation that the United States had been eavesdropping on Merkel’s cellphone for years. Range noted that an espionage conviction would carry a 10-year prison sentence.

He said his office had developed information that specific individuals, not impersonal computer programs, had been involved in tapping Merkel’s phone — and that that was one reason his office had decided to pursue the case.

“We’re finding ourselves in a new reality here. James Bond 007 is yesterday. James Bond 2.0 is today,” he said.

Range said he had contacted former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden through Snowden’s German attorney to testify. Snowden, who has been living in Moscow since he leaked hundreds of thousands of secret documents last year that revealed the extent of NSA electronic surveillance, has yet to respond, Range said.

What role Snowden’s documents may have had in the revelation that the U.S. was eavesdropping on Merkel’s phone remains uncertain, however.

The German newsmagazine Der Spiegel reported in October that its reporters had uncovered the information during their investigations into American spying. But unlike other reports in which they were quick to credit the Snowden documents, this one didn’t cite him as the source. Spiegel said only that its reporters had seen Merkel’s private number on a secret NSA list of spying targets, and not how it had obtained the list. Some members of Parliament have suggested that the information might not involve Snowden’s documents.

Still, news and allegations surrounding the NSA surveillance scandal have been front and center in German politics and discussion since the first story broke a year ago. Germans have a heightened sensitivity to government spying programs, drawn from their experience living through the Gestapo of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi reign and communist East Germany’s Stasi secret police.

By October, when the news broke that the United States had tapped Merkel’s cellphone, German anger at what was termed a breach of trust and friendship had hit a fever pitch.

Privacy advocates have repeatedly noted that German law protects all German citizens from spying, and the government has been under severe public pressure to open criminal probes not only into the tapping of Merkel’s phone, but also into the electronic surveillance the NSA undertook on millions of everyday German communications.

Range said, however, that for now he didn’t have enough evidence to prosecute wider allegations of NSA spying and had ruled out pursuing a case against U.S. spy agencies for having peeked into the private communications of everyday citizens. His office did say it would continue to monitor developments in the broader case.

AFP Photo/John MacDougall

Snowden: NSA Leaks Fueled Debate On Spying

Snowden: NSA Leaks Fueled Debate On Spying

Washington (AFP) – Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden said Monday he has no regrets over his leaks about mass surveillance programs, saying they sparked a needed public debate on spying and data collection.

Snowden, who spoke via video link from Russia to the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, said he revealed the programs of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and other such services to foster “a better civic understanding” about what had been secret programs.

He said his decision to leak documents to journalists “wasn’t so I could single handedly change the government; what I wanted to do was inform the public so they could provide their consent to what we should do.”

Snowden, a former NSA contractor who has been in hiding in Russia and has been charged in the United States with espionage, maintained that “every society in the world has benefited” from the debate on surveillance.

“Regardless of what happens to me, this is something we have a right to know,” he said on the link with members of the American Civil Liberties Union, who noted that the hookup was routed through seven proxy servers to keep his location secure.

Snowden, who appeared against a backdrop of a giant copy of the U.S. constitution, said the NSA programs have fundamentally altered the rights outlined in the charter.

“The interpretation of the constitution has been changed from ‘no unreasonable searches and seizures,’ to ‘any seizure is fine, just don’t search it,'” he said.

Snowden said he chose to speak to SXSW because he believes it is important to encourage technology companies to make changes to stem mass surveillance.

“The people who are in the room in Austin right now, they are the folks who can really fix things through technical standards,” he said.

Snowden said more companies should adopt robust encryption that is built into communications without users having to use complex technical tools.

He maintained that if encryption is too complex, “people aren’t going to use it; it has to happen automatically, it has to happen seamlessly.”

If online communications are fully encrypted at all stages, Snowden said, bulk data collection would become too difficult for intelligence agencies.

He also said the NSA and other agencies have devoted too many resources to this type of bulk collection and not enough to traditional methods to catch criminals and terrorists.

“We’ve had tremendous intelligence failures because we are monitoring everybody’s communications, instead of suspects,” he said.

He cited the Boston marathon bombings as an example, saying “if we hadn’t spent so much on mass surveillance, if we followed traditional models, we might have caught” the suspects.

One of the questions came via Twitter from Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, who thanked Snowden and asked how to make an intelligence oversight system more accountable.

Snowden said “the key factor is accountability” and that Congress needed a watchdog because it failed to adequately oversee the NSA.

“We can’t have officials who can lie to the Congress and not face any consequences,” he said. “We need a watchdog that watches Congress.”

Documents leaked by Snowden in 2013 revealed widespread surveillance of individuals and institutions in the United States and around the world.

He received temporary asylum in Russia in August — a move that infuriated the United States and was a key factor behind President Barack Obama’s decision to cancel a summit with counterpart Vladimir Putin last year.

Photo: Channel 4 via Flickr