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Bloomberg
The top U.S. and German diplomats met in a bid to overcome a spying dispute after Germany asked an American intelligence officer to leave the country.Amid their alliance’s most serious conflict in a decade, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier talked yesterday for about an hour while in Vienna for meetings on Iran’s nuclear program.
“The German-American relationship is essential and indispensable and that goes for us both,” Steinmeier told reporters in the Austrian capital. “We’ll continue to work on our relationship on the basis of trust and mutual respect.”
Chancellor Angela Merkel renewed her objections to what she called the U.S.’s Cold War-style intelligence gathering even as she sought to shield joint projects such as trade talks and curbing Iran’s nuclear program.
Spiegel Online
The latest revelations of US spying on Germany have unleashed unprecedented levels of distrust in Berlin. The government has already expelled the CIA's chief here and may soon be planning additional measures as it seeks answers from Washington.It was an unusual invitation that took four members of a German parliamentary control committee to London early last week. For the ninth time, lawmakers in the so-called "Five Eyes" countries tasked with supervising their respective intelligence services were meeting in the British capital. They had faced serious accusations of spying within the last year. This time, the British, Americans, Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders had invited their somewhat disgruntled German counterparts to join the group.
Al Jazeera America
Civil liberties groups took Britain's spy agencies to court Monday in a bid to limit electronic surveillance, as the country’s government tries to pass legislation to extend snooping powers.A special court, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, is hearing a challenge to mass online surveillance from groups including Liberty, Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union.
The organizations claim that mass collection of individuals’ communications data breaches the rights to private life and freedom of expression.
“Not content with forcing service providers to keep details of our calls and browsing histories, the government is fighting to retain the right to trawl through our communications with anyone outside and many inside the country,” said Liberty legal director James Welch. “When will it learn that it is neither ethical nor efficient to turn everyone into suspects?”
The rights groups launched their legal action after leaks about cyber-spying from former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden. He revealed details of a program called PRISM, which gives the NSA access to Internet companies' customer data, and a British operation, TEMPORA, that allows Britain's electronic spy agency to harvest data from undersea cables.
British authorities have not confirmed the existence of TEMPORA.