Berlin axes Cold War-era spying accords with US

[The Straight Story]

Berlin axes Cold War-era spying accords with US


Germany has cancelled surveillance accords dating from the late 1960s with the United States and Britain in the wake of revelations about vast US online spying.

Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said on Friday the move was "necessary and proper" amid the debate on data privacy protection sparked by the snooping scandal which also ignited uproar in Germany.

Chancellor Angela Merkel raised the issue with US President Barack Obama on
his June visit and has come under pressure in the run-up to September elections over Germany's knowledge of it.

Since then the government has announced a probe into ties between its secret services and US agencies whose sweeping online surveillance was revealed by fugitive intelligence analyst Edward Snowden.

Merkel has stressed that Germany "is not a surveillance state" and that "German law applies on German soil" but also conceded that this has its limits in the age of global telecommunication systems.

http://www.thelocal.de/national/20130803-51205.html

[Purveyor]

1. Spying Revelations And Coalition Arithmetic Could Complicate Angela Merkel’s Ride To Victory

FLOOD waters have receded, and Germans have returned to the rituals of summer. Angela Merkel, the chancellor, has made her annual pilgrimage to the Wagner festival in Bayreuth, donning a new blue outfit after two years of reusing the same dress. Voters who can are heading to the beach. The hot phase of the campaign for the parliamentary election on September 22nd is yet to come. It will begin on September 1st, when Mrs Merkel and her challenger, Peer Steinbrück, will have their only televised duel.

For Mrs Merkel, this seasonal torpor is fortuitous, for it coincides with a controversy that nobody could have foreseen a year ago. The revelations by Edward Snowden about the global spying of America’s and Britain’s secret services have shaken no country more than one of their closest allies, Germany. The details of Anglo-American snooping on German citizens remain unclear and confusing, but many Germans have already bought the “utterly senseless narrative”, as Hans-Peter Friedrich, Germany’s interior minister, lamented this week, that “thousands of Americans are sitting down reading our e-mails and listening to our phone calls”.

Memories of the Gestapo and the Stasi, the East German security service, have left Germans sensitive to violations of privacy. Most dangerously for Mrs Merkel, 79% of Germans believe that her government was aware of the snooping, says a July poll. She maintains that she will await American clarifications, and that “German law must apply on German soil”.

The opposition, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens and the ex-Communist Left Party, are trying to keep her on the defensive. They grilled Mrs Merkel’s chief of staff, Ronald Pofalla, during his testimony to a parliamentary committee in July, and will have two more chances to do so. Should new revelations materialise, Mr Pofalla may have to fall on his sword. Mr Friedrich is also under pressure. He has already travelled to Washington to get details, but has brought back nothing satisfactory yet.

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http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21582532-spying-revelations-and-coalition-arithmetic-could-complicate-angela-merkels-ride-victory