The recent NSA leaks have awakened many Europeans to the “disturbing” privacy violations regularly committed by the US that their own governments facilitated and may have benefited from, Jim Killock, the executive director of Open Rights Group, told RT.
European lawmakers have publicly condemned US authorities after
Edward Snowden, a former CIA technician and contracted NSA
employee, leaked classified documents revealing invasive and
indiscriminate US surveillance on citizens both foreign and
domestic.
The blockbuster disclosure has also put members of the European
Union in the hot seat, with citizens demanding to know if similar
programs were monitoring them. Jann Philipp Albrecht, a German
politician and member of the European Parliament, said “mass
surveillance is not what we want” before scheduling an
evaluation of the EU’s 20-year-old data protection laws for later
this summer.
RT: We’ve heard a lot of discontent and even outrage
from various European officials. But what have the British
said about this scandal?
Jim Killock: Obviously many of the newspapers,
particularly The Guardian, who broke the story, are outraged and
I have to say Open Rights group supporters are extremely outraged
as well. I feel there is a lot of public discontent but the truth
is that the government has been extremely complacent about all
this. William Hague brushed off all of the concerns they have
been expressing, saying that the British did nothing illegal,
that any information that the Americans have shared with them had
been done under all of the relevant laws. The problem is of
course that there are, more or less, no relevant laws and the
government has got an extremely free hand in the kind of
information from foreign sources that it uses so that is of very
little comfort to us.
RT: EU officials have demanded assurances that
Europeans will not be spied on. Will they ever know if the U.S.
is breaking their promise?
JK: Well, as far as the US Constitution goes, there is
more or less nothing that they can do. The Americans apply no
privacy rights to non-US nationals. They claim that, essentially,
anyone who is a foreign person can be spied on by them if there
are natural interests in doing so. So basically if you’re a
business that competes with American strategic businesses, if you
are somebody protesting American foreign policy, if you’re a
journalist that breaks a story like that about PRISM, and if
you’re foreign then the American government believes it has got a
right so spy on you. It’s extremely broad and I don’t think
there’s much they can say to Europeans that currently will mean
much at all.
RT: Some reports claim the UK not only knew about
America’s PRISM program for years, but also had access to it. How
come they’re not facing the same level of criticism?
JK: I think it is facing a good deal of criticism within
the UK. I think there’s been less within parliament than there
should be. I think a lot of politicians are being very
acquiescent and they haven’t yet grasped, completely, what is
going on here. But I think there is a lot of criticism out in
society at large. What is a bit disturbing about the attitude of
our government at the moment is that they are really resting on
the laurels of the Americans. They think, ‘Well, we’ve got a
close relationship with the Americans, we’re benefiting from the
intelligence we get from them, so let’s not rattle the cage too
much.’ I think that doesn’t apply, for instance, to the German
government or many other European governments who have a more
respectful relationship with their own laws and expect to respect
the privacy rights of their citizens, and are really quite
shocked at what the Americans are doing. The Germans, in
particular, they’ve had such experience with what surveillance
really means for their society that they do their absolute best
from stopping it from happening within Germany. So when they find
out that the Americans are spying on them pretty much more than
any other European country then of course they’re going to be
very shocked and angry.
RT: What do these revelations say about the scale of
global surveillance?
JK: I think what it tells us is our data can be accessed
reasonably easily when its in a particular country and the United
States is where most of our data lives if we use Google, Facebook
Microsoft products. That data ends up in America. But I think the
real lesson is you can do this properly. The Americans are not
doing this properly. The Americans have written secretive laws
which say if they want to spy on our data in American data
centers then they can do it in secret without telling the public
who they’re working with, how their systems work, or how many of
these they issue. If you have that kind of secretive process with
secret courts deciding what can and can’t be done then you have a
completely unaccountable system. You can badger and threaten
politicians into agreeing into all kinds of things because if you
say to a politician, ‘This is your choice: spy on some citizens
who we think are guilty or deal with terrorist atrocities,’ they
will choose the spying. That’s why it has got to be out in the
open, with courts.
This article originally appeared on: RT