EU’s concern over US bugging claims

Senior European officials expressed concern at reports that US intelligence agents bugged EU offices on both sides of the Atlantic, with some leftist politicians calling for concrete sanctions against Washington.

The president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, said he was “deeply worried and shocked about the allegations of US authorities spying on EU offices” made in a report published by German news weekly Der Spiegel.

The magazine said the surveillance was carried out by the US National Security Agency (NSA), which has been the subject of leaks claiming it scanned vast amounts of foreign Internet traffic. The US government has defended its efforts to intercept electronic communications overseas by arguing that this has helped prevent terror attacks.

Schulz said that if the allegations that the NSA bugged EU offices were confirmed “it would be an extremely serious matter which will have a severe impact on EU-US relations”.

Green Party leaders in the European Parliament, Rebecca Harms and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, called for an immediate investigation into the claims and suggested that recently launched negotiations on a transatlantic trade treaty should be put on hold.

They also called for existing US-EU agreements on the exchange of bank transfer and passenger record information to be cancelled. Both programs have been labelled as unwarranted infringements of citizens’ privacy by left-wing and libertarian politicians in Europe.

“If the media reports are accurate, then this recalls the methods used by enemies during the Cold War,” said German justice minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger. “It is beyond comprehension that our friends in the United States see Europeans as enemies.”

The report cited classified US documents taken by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the magazine said it had partly seen.

Spokespeople for the NSA and the office for the national intelligence director in Washington did not immediately respond to requests for comment Sunday.

According to Der Spiegel, the NSA planted bugs in the EU’s diplomatic offices in Washington and infiltrated the building’s computer network. Similar measures were taken at the EU’s mission to the UN in New York, the magazine said.

The magazine did not specify how it learned of the NSA’s alleged eavesdropping efforts at a key EU office in Brussels. There, the NSA used secure facilities at Nato headquarters nearby to dial into telephone maintenance systems that would have allowed it to intercept senior EU officials’ calls and Internet traffic, the Spiegel report said.

Meanwhile Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa said Snowden was “under the care of Russian authorities” and cannot leave Moscow’s international airport without his passport.

Mr Correa said the Ecuadorean consul in London committed “a serious error” without consulting any officials in Ecuador’s capital when the consul issued a letter of safe passage for Snowden.