David Vincenzetti "Berlin is pressing the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, to incorporate data safeguards into the negotiations for the planned Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, launched thi

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Today at 12:43 PM

"Berlin is pressing the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, to incorporate data safeguards into the negotiations for the planned Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, launched this year by EU leaders and US President Barack Obama."

"Separately, German officials also want closer government-to-government co-operation on espionage. The country is excluded from the decades-old accord called “five eyes” that links the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Berlin is not thought to be seeking to join the five eyes team but does want more effective agreements with allies, especially the US.”

Another interesting article on the far-reaching political consequences of the NSA scandal.

From today’s FT, FYI,

David

November 18, 2013 7:14 pm

Angela Merkel says spy scandal is testing EU-US trade talks

By Stefan Wagstyl in Berlin

German chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday warned that the NSA spying scandal was putting pressure on talks to forge an EU-US trade pact, in the clearest sign yet of the affair’s impact on economic ties.

Speaking before the German parliament, Ms Merkel urged Washington to provide “a clarification” of its alleged mass surveillance as “a basis for building new transatlantic trust”.

In her toughest words on the scandal so far, the chancellor said: “The relationship with the US and the negotiation of a transatlantic free trade agreement are currently, without doubt, being put to the test by the accusations that have been aired against the US about the gathering of millions of bits of data.”

The revelations from Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor, have caused outrage in Germany after it emerged that Ms Merkel’s own mobile phone was allegedly tapped for a decade. The chancellor’s statement confirms that, as the FT reported earlier this month, Berlin is making an explicit link between the affair and the trade negotiations.

Berlin is pressing the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, to incorporate data safeguards into the negotiations for the planned Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, launched this year by EU leaders and US President Barack Obama.

Separately, German officials also want closer government-to-government co-operation on espionage. The country is excluded from the decades-old accord called “five eyes” that links the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Berlin is not thought to be seeking to join the five eyes team but does want more effective agreements with allies, especially the US.

In her first comments to parliament since the scandal broke in the summer, Ms Merkel said that new trust could come only from transparency and a recognition that the transatlantic relationship was for both sides – and especially for Germany – a true guarantee of freedom and security.

Despite the NSA affair German-American and transatlantic relations remained exceptionally significant for Germany and for Europe, she said.

Germany is torn between popular demands for tough privacy rules – fed, in part, by its complicated history with Nazi and later Stasi domestic surveillance – and its export-oriented companies’ fears of being hampered in the global economy by excessive regulation.

Until this summer, Berlin was reluctantly prepared to see its domestic rules diluted for the sake of broader accords on the commercial use of data with EU partners and with the US. But the NSA affair has prompted some German politicians to reconsider this approach and some German companies to look again at the risks of industrial espionage – including from the US.

Ms Merkel’s own views appear to be hardening. At last month’s EU summit she distanced herself from a suggestion from Martin Schulz, the German Social Democrat president of the European parliament, to put the transatlantic trade talks on hold pending a discussion of data protection.

She said then that linking the two issues was not raised at the summit. But on Monday she was making a clear connection between trade and the NSA affair.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013.

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David Vincenzetti 
CEO