NSA spying is a bigger diplomatic strain than Iraq invasion

As US and German officials meet this week to discuss privacy and security in the cyber realm, a German official is calling recent revelations of NSA spying on his country the "biggest strain in bilateral relations with the US" since the controversy surrounding the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Actually, he said, it's "bigger than Iraq".

"Iraq was a disagreement of a foreign policy," the official, who requested anonymity, told Wired. "This is a disagreement of a relationship between two allies."

The US State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Last year, the German news weeklyDer Spiegelreported that the NSA had been eavesdropping on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone. The CIA and NSA reportedly maintained a listening station at the US embassyin Berlin that it used to monitor German government communications.

The German government, outraged by the spying, has reportedly ended a contract with the US-based telecom Verizonout of concern that the company might be cooperating with the NSA in its eavesdropping activities. The government has also sent lists of questions to the US government inquiring about its surveillance against German citizens. But, according toDer Spiegel, although the NSA promised to send "relevant documents" in response -- in an effort "to re-establish transparency between the two governments" -- it failed to do so.

The spying scandal has come at a particularly delicate time, as the US is faced with mobilising support to address issues like the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the rise of the militant group ISIS in Iraq. But the German official says the scandal has caused some to call into question existing perceptions about the legitimacy of US interests in such matters. "Even if governments agree with the US position, it's more difficult [for them] to defend that position to their electorates now," he says.

The German official notes that not all European governments share a dim view of the US in the aftermath of the revelations. Countries like Germany with a recent history of authoritarianism are more sensitive to the surveillance issue than those with a longer history of democracy, he says, because they have a greater wariness of state institutions and control.

"They distrust the state [in general] and they want to make sure that they control the state and not that the state controls them," he says. "In all of Europe, with the exception of Belarus, you have solid democracies. But in some of those, you have relatively recent authoritarianism."

Another European official told Wired the spying is likely to affect international commerce, particularly trade agreements, going forward. European countries that have other issues with regard to trade negotiations with the United States likely will use the spying as leverage to gain an upper hand in those negotiations, he says.

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NSA spying is a bigger diplomatic strain than Iraq invasion