NSA leaks: UK blocks crucial espionage talks between US and Europe
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.
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.
This gets murky in terms of EU politics and the US/UK special relationship. The UK has long attempted to have one foot in Europe and the other in the middle of the Atlantic. We have had major revelations about the close partnership between the US and UK in the data collection and spying business. It is not surprising that they don't the rest of the EU getting in on the action.
We saw information yesterday that France has its own version of the game in operation and that there have been reports that Germany does too. I'm not sure just how Sweden fits into the picture.
One can be pretty confident that the UK didn't take action on this without close consultations across the pond.