Germany has dissolved a fifty-years-old surveillance pact with the United States and Britain in response to a “debate about protecting personal privacy” in the country, which was sparked by revelations of the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The agreement that dated back to the late 1960s gave the US,
Britain and France the right to request German authorities carry
out surveillance operations so as to protect their troops
stationed within the country.
“The cancellation of the administrative agreements, which we
have pushed for in recent weeks, is a necessary and proper
consequence of the recent debate about protecting personal
privacy,” Germany’s Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said
in a statement on Friday.
Germany was currently in talks with France to cancel its part of
the agreement as well, a German official told AP on condition of
anonymity.
Following Snowden’s leaks, which disclosed the span of the NSA
surveillance program and revealed that Germany is the most spied on EU country by the US, there has
been a heated nationwide debate on whether the alleged massive
privacy breach of German citizens should have been allowed.
The documents leaked Snowden say that the US spy agency combs
through half a billion of German phone calls, emails
and text messages on a monthly basis.
Weeks before German national elections, the country’s opposition
parties demanded to clarification to what extent the government
knew of the NSA’s intelligence gathering in Germany. This comes
amid reports of seemingly close ties the two national spy
agencies – the NSA and the BND – have had over the years.
German government officials have insisted that American and
British intelligence agencies were never given permission to
break Germany’s strict privacy laws.