C[omp]ute

From: andrew cooke <andrew@...>

Date: Sat, 29 Jun 2013 21:37:26 -0400

Original was at http://www.guardian.co.uk/info/2013/jun/30/taken-down

This copied from
http://www.darkpolitricks.com/2013/06/revealed-secret-european-deals-to-hand-over-private-data-to-america/

Andrew


Wayne Madsen, an NSA worker for 12 years, has revealed that six EU countries,
in addition to the UK, colluded in data harvesting.  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 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 that 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 pre-date 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 last night.

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, although the
British government denies any suggestion that it was obtained illegally. In
return, GCHQ has allegedly provided huge amounts of data to the NSA.

"The European parliament must intervene," said Simon Davies, who runs the
Privacy Surgeon blog. "MEPs should put the interests of citizens above party
politics and create meaningful reforms."