First talks
to soothe transatlantic tensions to be restricted to data privacy and Prism
programme after Britain and Sweden's veto
guardian.co.uk,
Ian Traynor in Vilnius, Friday 5 July 2013
Britain has blocked the first crucial talks on intelligence and espionage between European officials and their American counterparts since the NSA surveillance scandal erupted.
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| José Manuel Barroso, the European commission president, and Dalia Grybauskaitė, Lithuania's president, have backed down from initial demands of two strands of dialogue with the Americans. Photograph: Valda Kalnina/EPA |
Britain has blocked the first crucial talks on intelligence and espionage between European officials and their American counterparts since the NSA surveillance scandal erupted.
The talks,
due to begin in Washington on Monday, will now be restricted to issues of data
privacy and the NSA's Prism programme following a tense 24 hours of
negotiations in Brussels between national EU ambassadors. Britain, supported
only by Sweden, vetoed plans to launch two "working groups" on the
espionage debacle with the Americans.
Instead,
the talks will consist of one working group focused on the NSA's Prism
programme, which has been capturing and storing vast amounts of internet and
mobile phone metadata in Europe.
The
disclosures in the Guardian over the past month have triggered a transatlantic
crisis of confidence and threatened to derail crucial free trade talks between the EU and the US, also due to be launched in Washington on Monday.
The talks
on Prism and data privacy have been arranged to coincide with the trade talks
in an attempt to defuse the transatlantic tension. EU diplomats and officials
say the offer of talks by the Americans is designed to enable the leaders of
Germany and France to save face following revelations about the scale of US
espionage – particularly in Germany, but also of French and other European
embassies and missions in the US.
Other
aspects of the dispute, such as more traditional spying and intelligence
matters, will be off limits for the Europeans after Britain insisted the EU had
no authority to discuss issues of national security and intelligence.
"It
was decided. It finished successfully," said Dalia Grybauskaitė, the
president of Lithuania, which has just assumed the EU's six-month rotating
presidency and which mediated the sensitive talks in Brussels over the past two
days.
On
Thursday, Grybauskaitė said the Europeans hoped to hold two separate strands of
consultations with the Americans. By Friday she and José Manuel Barroso, the
European commission president, conceded that the intelligence strand had been
dropped. "Intelligence matters and those of national security are not the
competence of the EU," he said, echoing the UK's objection.
Senior EU
diplomats, officials, and government ministers confirmed that Britain opposed
most of the rest of the EU on joint European talks with the Americans on
intelligence and espionage, meaning that national governments will need to
pursue the issues separately with Washington.
"The
consultations in Washington will first of all address data protection matters.
Addressing the intelligence topic is not expected," said a senior
Lithuanian official.
The
Lithuanian government phoned Carl Bildt, Sweden's foreign minister, on Thursday
evening to try to remove the Swedish resistance, but failed, sources said. The
talks in Brussels continued throughout the night as diplomats sought to come up
with wording that would keep everyone happy.
Officials
said the abortive attempt to come up with a common European position only
served to highlight the divisions that have surfaced as a result of the
espionage scandal, with the Europeans against the Americans, the French and the
Germans against the British, and leading pro-EU figures arguing that the fiasco
has underlined the case for Europe constructing its own cyber-defences.
"We
need our own capacities, European cloud computing, EU strategic
independence," said Michel Barnier, the French politician and European
commissioner for the single market.
Such is the
transatlantic and intra-European disarray over the espionage wars, that senior
east and west European politicians and intelligence veterans privately suspect a
Russian role in the intelligence row. They point to the presence of the NSA
whistleblower, Edward Snowden – apparently still at Moscow's Sheremetyevo
airport – and to the controversy surrounding the Bolivian presidential plane.
President Evo Morales, travelling from Moscow, was forced to land in Vienna
after being denied permission to enter the airspace of several EU countries.
The
surveillance dispute led to calls, particularly from France, for the
long-awaited negotiations on a transatlantic free trade pact to be delayed. The
simultaneous opening of talks on the NSA, Prism and surveillance is designed to
mute such calls and give European leaders an opportunity to climb down while
claiming concessions from the Americans, EU diplomats said.
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