After their respective talks with President Obama about NSA surveillance of EU member nations, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has unveiled a proposal to create a European counter-espionage-focused communications network to foil NSA and GCHQ surveillance, and is discussing those plans with French President Francois Hollande.
NSA surveillance has become a huge concern across Europe, but nowhere more than in Germany, where NSA and GCHQ surveillance operations, running out of the US and British embassies, have been enormous and well publicized.
While the US has a deal with Britain to share surveillance data, the two seem to be eagerly targeting anyone and everyone else in the EU, despite Britain’s membership, and that could make an EU-wide network difficult to pull off.
If anything, it might convince the rest of the EU that Britain simply can’t be trusted to be involved in the network, and should be cut out and treated like a “foreign” communication source, which could put them at a disadvantage in trade with other EU members.
This article first appeared on Antiwar.