The Honeymoon Is Over

Our boy Barry is headed to Germany next week.

“It was really a shock. A big, big shock.” That’s how University of Muenster telecommunications law professor Thomas Hoeren describes the German reaction to the recent NSA spying revelations.

“During the Nazi regime, there was a really big collection of personal data, so Germans hate big governments collecting a lot of data.”

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“The last time he was here, we saw him as a kind of hero. We loved him,” says Thomas Hoeren. “But now he will get a lot of criticism, and people protesting him.”

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[The] European Parliament met in emergency session Tuesday to discuss the NSA data snooping program, known as PRISM.

After the session, Dutch MEP Judith Sargentini told the BBC: “If it wasn’t so sad I would have laughed last Friday when Obama said, ‘No worries people, this is only for foreigners, not for Americans.’”

  The World

BERLIN (AP) — Germany’s chancellor will raise the issue of NSA’s eavesdropping on European communications when she meets President Barack Obama here next week — the latest sign of the international backlash over America’s sweeping electronic surveillance programs.

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European nations often have much stricter privacy laws than those in the U.S., and their citizens defend those privacy rights with more vigor.

In Brussels, senior European Union officials said they would also question their American counterparts about the impact of such programs on the privacy of EU citizens during a trans-Atlantic ministerial meeting in Dublin starting Thursday.

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The European Parliament will hold a debate Tuesday to discuss the revelations with the European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s executive arm.

“We have always been firm on data protection within the EU and when negotiating with third countries, including the US,” said caucus leader Guy Verhofstadt of the Alde group of liberal parties. “It would be unacceptable and would need swift action from the EU if indeed the U.S. National Security Agency were processing European data without permission.”

  TPM