Obama Tries to ‘Make Clear’ to Furious France That U.S. Is Reviewing Spy Practices
Do not disturb Kerry to deal with the latest NSA fallout: He was in Paris, but "focused on Middle East peace stuff."
WASHINGTON — The White House only slightly scrambled today to mop up the latest diplomatic crisis sparked by the National Security Agency’s surveillance of friendly foreign countries, as revealed by leaker Edward Snowden.
Le Monde cited documents handed over by Snowden in its article today claiming that U.S. intelligence intercepted some 70 million phone calls within France from Dec. 10, 2012, to Jan. 8, 2013.
It follows testy exchanges with spied-upon Germany, Brazil and Mexico. Last month, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff canceled plans to visit Washington to meet with President Obama, angry about leaked NSA documents suggesting that she’s been a target of surveillance. White House press secretary Jay Carney tried to downplay the cancellation, saying President Obama “understands and regrets the concerns disclosures of alleged U.S. intelligence activities have generated in Brazil and made clear that he is committed to working together with President Rousseff and her government in diplomatic channels to move beyond this issue as a source of tension in our bilateral relationship.”
Carney said the new meeting date would be Oct. 23, but then in the next breath said they’d meet “at a date to be mutually agreed.” There is no meeting with Rousseff on Obama’s schedule for Wednesday.
The Brazilian president spent a good part of her UN General Assembly speech blasting the U.S. “In Brazil, the situation was even more serious since we, Brazil, feature as a target of such an intrusion. Citizens’ personal data and information have been indiscriminately targeted and intercepted. Business information, often times of high economic and even strategic value have been the target of spying activity,” Rousseff said last month. “…The problem, however, goes beyond the bilateral relations of two countries. It affects the international community itself and, as such, requires an answer from it.”
Today, Obama was forced to hop on the phone with French President Francois Hollande to attempt to make amends for the latest breach.
“According to the elements obtained by Le Monde, when a telephone number is used in France, it activates a signal which automatically triggers the recording of the call. Apparently this surveillance system also picks up SMS messages and their content using key words. Finally, the NSA apparently stores the history of the connections of each target – or the meta-data,” reads the English-language Le Monde article.
“One of the documents which Le Monde was able to consult notes that between 8 February and 8 March 2013, the NSA collected, throughout the world, 124.8 billion telephone data items and 97.1 billion computer data items. In Europe, only Germany and the United Kingdom exceed France in terms of numbers of interceptions.”
France quickly summoned U.S. Ambassador Charles Rivkin to answer for the report.
“The American ambassador was received by the Quai d’Orsay’s chief of staff this morning. As the foreign minister indicated, we reminded him that such practices between partners are totally unacceptable and that he must assure us that they are no longer going on. We asked for a prompt and tangible response to our concerns,” French Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexandre Giorgini told reporters.
Giorgini added that “as soon as the first revelations emerged, we proposed to our EU partners that our negotiations with the United States include a data-protection track.”
“At our request, a US-EU working group was therefore established in July. It has already met twice,” he said. “The European Council of October 24 and 25, which will largely be devoted to digital challenges, will deal with this issue at the highest level, among heads of state and government. The digital economy cannot function properly without an effective guarantee of personal data.”
Secretary of State John Kerry was in Paris today, but was focused on Middle East peace goals and didn’t break away to address the crisis with our Revolutionary War ally.
“Look, France is one of our oldest allies in the world, and I have a very close working relationship with [Foreign Minister] Laurent Fabius since the day I started this job on many issues, ranging from Syria to protecting the security of our citizens. And protecting the security of our citizens in today’s world is a very complicated, very challenging task, and it is an everyday, 24/7, 365 task, unfortunately, because there are lots of people out there seeking to do harm to other people. We see much more suicide bombs taking place in various parts of the world right now,” Kerry said at a press conference with Qatari Foreign Minister Khalid al-Atiyah before their meeting.
“So Ambassador Rivkin met today with Alexandre Ziegler, the cabinet director to Foreign Minister Fabius, at the request of the Government of France. And our ongoing – we will have ongoing bilateral consultations, including with our French partners, that address this question of any reports by the United States Government gathering information from some of the agencies, and those consultations are going to continue,” Kerry continued.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for commenting. Your comments are needed for helping to improve the discussion.