Brussels, 11/06/2013 (Agence Europe) - On Tuesday morning, MEPs in Strasbourg almost unanimously condemned the actions of American intelligence services that have many times spied on all the communications - including those of European citizens - sent via several big groups such as Google or Facebook. This programme - called Prism and revealed by the Washington Post and the Guardian last Thursday - was considered sufficiently shocking for the ALDE Group to obtain, on Monday evening, a specific debate on the subject. Unsurprisingly, the political groups - but with the exception of the ECR Group which did not want to condemn the Prism programme hastily or without evidence - all expressed their anger and concern at this huge surveillance programme of personal communications.
In the view of the EPP representative, Manfred Weber (Germany), “it is worrying when we see this” and “I am very concerned about the amount of data involved”. He demanded “transparency from the companies” and said that “harmonised standards” are needed and “perhaps the definition of international standards”. He also wondered about the role of the United Kingdom and its possible complicity in the transfer of European data to the United States.
In the S&D Group's opinion, these revelations are firstly “a serious breach of trust” with the US, said Claude Moraes (UK), and the EU-US ministerial meeting which is being held in Dublin at the end of the week must “be the occasion to speak about this”. The EU needs “to know what they have done with this surveillance” and all the information “that is not needed and breaks our trust”. Moraes believes that it is more necessary than ever to find the balance between “security and the need to protect data”. He is also concerned at the lack of transatlantic agreement on the issue with the US.
For the ALDE Group and Sophie int'Veld (Netherlands), something of an expert on the issue, “500 million Europeans have been shocked”. This programme is an “enormous problem” but “we should not feign surprise. We know that they spy on us, but we hit a brick wall when we ask them questions”, in't Veld added. She was disappointed on Tuesday morning that those mainly responsible for the matter at the European Commission had not taken part in the debate. Indeed, it was European Commissioner for Health and Consumer Policy Tonio Borg that the MEPs addressed. Borg just repeated the Commission's discontent at the Prism programme and deplored the fact that no solution had yet been found although the issue is not new. The Commission has tackled the need to have a framework for data protection on several occasions - a framework which can be applied to all sectoral agreements on the transfer of personal data. The Commission has also provided for mechanisms in its reform of the 1995 directive on personal data enabling Europe to guard against such pitfalls. Yet these calls have been rejected by the member states because they “would of course complicate and even make the existence of such programmes virtually impossible”, a source pointed out on Monday.
In the meantime, Borg has assured the MEPs that the EU must certainly be “able to respond to this kind of scandal” and obtain the same level of protection and right of appeal from the US as it offers its citizens. However, Borg also believed that the objectives of such surveillance programmes should not be lost from sight, nor should we “forget our true enemy - terrorism, which requires good intelligence to be gathered”. Terrorists “don't have rules”, Borg added, saying that a balance between “rights and duties” must quickly be found. (SP/transl.fl)