Revealed: secret European deals to hand over private data to
America
Germany 'among countries offering intelligence' according to
new claims by former US defence analyst
Wayne Madsen, an NSA worker for 12 years, has revealed that
six EU countries, in addition to the UK, colluded in data harvesting.
Jamie Doward
At least six European Union countries in addition to Britain
have been colluding with the US over the mass harvesting of personal
communications data, according to a former contractor to America's National
Security Agency, who said the public should not be "kept in the
dark".
Wayne Madsen, a former US navy lieutenant who first worked
for the NSA in 1985 and over the next 12 years held several sensitive positions
within the agency, names Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain and
Italy as having secret deals with the US.
Madsen said the countries had "formal second and third
party status" under signal intelligence (sigint) agreements that compels
them to hand over data, including mobile phone and internet information to the
NSA if requested.
Under international intelligence agreements, confirmed by
declassified documents, nations are categorised by the US according to their
trust level. The US is first party while the UK, Canada, Australia and New
Zealand enjoy second party relationships. Germany and France have third party
relationships.
In an interview published last night on the
PrivacySurgeon.org blog, Madsen, who has been attacked for holding
controversial views on espionage issues, said he had decided to speak out after
becoming concerned about the "half story" told by EU politicians
regarding the extent of the NSA's activities in Europe.
He said that under the agreements, which were drawn up after
the second world war, the "NSA gets the lion's share" of the sigint
"take". In return, the third parties to the NSA agreements received
"highly sanitised intelligence".
Madsen said he was alarmed at the "sanctimonious
outcry" of political leaders who were "feigning shock" about the
spying operations while staying silent about their own arrangements with the
US, and was particularly concerned that senior German politicians had accused
the UK of spying when their country had a similar third-party deal with the
NSA.
Although the level of co-operation provided by other
European countries to the NSA is not on the same scale as that provided by the
UK, the allegations are potentially embarrassing.
"I can't understand how Angela Merkel can keep a
straight face, demanding assurances from [Barack] Obama and the UK while
Germany has entered into those exact relationships," Madsen said.
The Liberal Democrat MEP Baroness Ludford, a senior member
of the European parliament's civil liberties, justice and home affairs
committee, said Madsen's allegations confirmed that the entire system for
monitoring data interception was a mess, because the EU was unable to intervene
in intelligence matters, which remained the exclusive concern of national
governments.
"The intelligence agencies are exploiting these
contradictions and no one is really holding them to account," Ludford
said. "It's terribly undermining to liberal democracy."
Madsen's disclosures have prompted calls for European
governments to come clean on their arrangements with the NSA. "There needs
to be transparency as to whether or not it is legal for the US or any other
security service to interrogate private material," said John Cooper QC, a
leading international human rights lawyer. "The problem here is that none
of these arrangements has been debated in any democratic arena. I agree with
William Hague that sometimes things have to be done in secret, but you don't
break the law in secret."
Madsen said all seven European countries and the US have
access to the Tat 14 fibre-optic cable network running between Denmark and
Germany, the Netherlands, France, the UK and the US, allowing them to intercept
vast amounts of data, including phone calls, emails and records of users'
access to websites.
He said the public needed to be made aware of the full scale
of the communication-sharing arrangements between European countries and the
US, which predate the internet and became of strategic importance during the
cold war.
The covert relationship between the countries was first
outlined in a 2001 report by the European parliament, but their explicit
connection with the NSA was not publicised until Madsen decided to speak out.
The European parliament's report followed revelations that
the NSA was conducting a global intelligence-gathering operation, known as
Echelon, which appears to have established the framework for European member
states to collaborate with the US.
"A lot of this information isn't secret, nor is it
new," Madsen said. "It's just that governments have chosen to keep
the public in the dark about it. The days when they could get away with a
conspiracy of silence are over."
This month another former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden,
revealed to the Guardian previously undisclosed US programmes to monitor
telephone and internet traffic. The NSA is alleged to have shared some of its
data, gathered using a specialist tool called Prism, with Britain's GCHQ.
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