Germany’s Merkel compares US’s NSA to ‘Stasi’

Germany’s Merkel compares US’s NSA to ‘Stasi’

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has compared the spying activities of the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) to those of the secret police of former Communist East Germany, known as Stasi.

“This is like the Stasi; the NSA clearly could not be trusted with private information, because they let [NSA whistleblower Edward] Snowden clean them out”” Merkel told US President Barack Obama, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, without specifying when the conversation between the two leaders took place.
The report said Merkel was particularly livid over the US tapping her mobile phone calls, following revelations made by Snowden about global spying activities by the NSA.

In October, Edward Snowden leaked top secret US government spying programs, under which the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) eavesdrop on millions of American and European phone records and internet data from major internet companies such as Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

The NSA scandal took even broader dimensions when Snowden revealed information about its espionage activities targeting friendly countries and their leaders, which included bugging German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone over a decade.

The intelligence partnership between Berlin and Washington has faltered over the spying report, with Berlin insisting on a no-spying deal. This is while the US National security Advisor Susan Rice has said that such a deal is “off the table.”

On November 21, German politicians agreed on anti-spying measures, under which the use of iPhones and Apple products would be banned in the German parliament.