Privacy is an emotional issue in Europe, where memories of state-sponsored snooping by communist and fascist regimes still linger. And so the revelation Thursday that the U.S. National Security Agency had obtained routine access to e-mail, Web searches and other online data from many of the biggest U.S. Internet companies — whose users stretch far beyond U.S. shores — prompted hand-wringing about America’s moral authority.
“If the U.S. complains about foreign governments spying and then it turns out it is doing the same thing — well, what are you complaining about?” said Yaman Akdeniz, a law professor at Istanbul Bilgi University in Turkey, where anger over restrictions on civil liberties has fueled anti-government protests.
The Guardian, the British news organization that first reported existence of the U.S. snooping program on Thursday, noted in an editorial that its report appeared on June 6, the anniversary of D-Day in 1944 — the beginning of the end of Hitler’s police state.
“The young Americans who fought their way up the Normandy beaches rightly believed they were helping free the world from a tyranny,” The Guardian wrote. “They did not think that they were making it safe for their own rulers to take such sweeping powers as these over their descendants.”
Google, Facebook, Apple and other companies cited in news reports of the U.S. surveillance program, known as Prism, denied on Friday that they were providing the National Security Agency continuous backdoor access to their subscribers data. Instead, the companies said they had disclosed user data to the U.S. government only when legally required to do so.
“We have never heard of Prism,” Apple said in a statement late Thursday. “We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order.”
While privacy advocates condemned the U.S. surveillance program, official reaction from European capitals was more muted. That might be in part, analysts said, because some governments already have, or would like to wield, similar powers to monitor Internet communications.
The Guardian reported Friday, for example, that Government Communications Headquarters, a British intelligence agency, had been given access to Prism since 2010. A spokesman for the agency declined to comment.
The government of Prime Minister David Cameron last year proposed legislation that would have given the secret services broad digital surveillance powers, including access to e-mail records and the digital addresses used to identify computers. The proposal followed street riots in London, which Mr. Cameron said were fueled by the use of private communications networks like BlackBerry Messenger.
Opposition from the Liberal Democratic Party, the junior partner to Mr. Cameron’s Conservatives in the governing coalition, appeared to sink the bill this spring. But there has been talk of reviving it in the wake of an attack in London last month, in which a man was hacked to death.
In the Netherlands, too, the authorities have been pushing for broader digital surveillance powers. A draft bill would let the Dutch police break into the computers of crime suspects, including those based outside the country. The country’s Intelligence Act is also being revised, and there has been talk of adding snooping abilities like those apparently possessed by the N.S.A.
“There will be a lot of jealousy among services that the U.S. has these powers,” said Simone Halink, a spokeswoman for Bits of Freedom, a Dutch digital rights group. “The fact that a powerful government is doing this, and saying it is doing it in accordance with the law, is alarming and a reason for increased vigilance.”
In Europe, privacy is also a business and trade issue. The European Union is actively debating how best to update its data protection laws for the digital era. The process has been shaped by an intense trans-Atlantic lobbying campaign by U.S. Internet companies that want to soften some of the proposed privacy protections, which worry that tight strictures could crimp online advertising sales and other digital commerce.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/business/global/us-internet-spying-draws-anger-and-envy.html?partner=rss&emc=rss