EU lawmakers call for sanctions against the United States concerning NSA spy scandal

[davidn3600]

BERLIN (AP) — Senior European officials expressed concern Sunday at reports that U.S. intelligence agents bugged EU offices on both sides of the Atlantic, with some leftist lawmakers calling for concrete sanctions against Washington.

The president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, said he was "deeply worried and shocked about the allegations of U.S. authorities spying on EU offices" made in a report published Sunday by German news weekly Der Spiegel.

The magazine said the surveillance was carried out by the U.S. National Security Agency, which has recently been the subject of leaks claiming it scanned vast amounts of foreign Internet traffic. The U.S. government has defended its efforts to intercept electronic communications overseas by arguing that this has helped prevent terror attacks at home and abroad.

Schulz said that if the allegations that the NSA bugged European Union offices were confirmed "it would be an extremely serious matter which will have a severe impact on EU-US relations."
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"If the media reports are accurate, then this recalls the methods used by enemies during the Cold War," German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger. "It is beyond comprehension that our friends in the United States see Europeans as enemies."

http://news.yahoo.com/european-officials-slam-us-over-bugging-report-135703554.html

[Jackpine Radical]

1. That's all cool, but it invites a discussion of

what the EU has been doing in espionage circles. Britain, for example, is far from clean--they are at least as bad as we are, maybe a little further down the road to "V's" world with all their surveillance & various other incursions on civil liberties.

[Spider Jerusalem]

2. The UK is not the EU

and what individual EU states may or may not be doing is in all likelihood independent of the EU (whereas the UK's surveillance and communications interceptions have not been independent of American intelligence agencies, but in conjunction with them; "Five Eyes" and all).

[WillyT]

3. K & R !!!