German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger has written to British ministers demanding to know to what extent a British spy agency targeted German citizens in a large-scale data trawling programme that has upset Berlin.
“The accusations show that the German government must do everything it can to thoroughly and quickly clear up every open question about Prism and Tempora,” she said on Wednesday
“Three lean lines are not enough,” she added, referring to the answer send the German Interior Minister Hans Peter Friedrich. “Letters to my colleagues have not been answered yet. The British government must give those answers.”
Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger again reiterated that she intends to discuss the issues of date safety within the European Union at the meeting of EU justice ministers in July.
Based on leaks by fugitive former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden, the Guardian newspaper reported earlier this month that Britain’s Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) had tapped international telephone and Internet traffic on a massive scale in a programme codenamed “Tempora”.
Germans are sensitive about government monitoring, having lived through the Stasi secret police in communist East Germany and with lingering memories of the Gestapo under the Nazis.
The British justice ministry told Reuters it would respond to the letter “in due course”. The Home Office, or interior ministry, said it did not comment on private correspondence.
The sharpest German criticism of the Tempora claims has come from the junior partner in Merkel’s centre-right coalition, the Free Democrats (FDP), to which the justice minister belongs.
The Snowden leaks about the practices of the U.S. and British spying agencies caused a global scandal and resulted in multiple diplomatic headaches for both Washington and London.
The Snowden revelations, and in particular the allegation that British spies handed over large amounts of data to their U.S. colleagues, have also stirred lively debate within Britain.
The British government generally refrains from commenting on the work of its security services, but Foreign Secretary William Hague alluded to the Snowden scandal and defended U.S.-British intelligence cooperation in a speech in Los Angeles on Tuesday.