Now put all the pressure on the United States - IT.Branschen

A week after to the newspapers The Guardian and The Washington Post began publishing leaked documents, showing how the U.S. government with signals intelligence organization NSA in tip conducts surveillance of unprecedented scale, starting the reactions reach storm strength. Not least in Europe.

Class=”paragraphIntro”> European Commission Vice-President Viviane Reding has sent a strongly worded letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, demanding from the EU for explanations about the controversial Prism program and related activities. EU wants to include more about Prism is targeted against its citizens, how the data are collected, reconnaissance only to national and international security or other areas, and the rights of citizens and businesses in the EU has to oppose the collection of data. It writes The Guardian.

Reding writes that she is concerned that the U.S. “has access and processing, large-scale, EU citizens’ data at major U.S. Internet companies “and that this could have” serious consequences for the EU citizens’ fundamental rights. ” EU expects a detailed response before Union Ministers holding council on Friday.

ans wer can get impact on trade relations between the U.S. and the EU. United States is among the countries with the stamp “safe harbor” of the EU, which is given to countries that may be entrusted to handle EU citizens’ data.

Even in the U.S. grows protests. Activist Organization ACLU, American Civil Liberties Union, have sued the U.S. government in a New York court for constitutional violations. The ACLU believes that NSA’s activities can be compared to the state “steals every American address.”

U.S. House of Representatives was informed on Tuesday evening, behind closed doors by senior managers from intelligence agencies and the FBI. After the meeting were representatives from both Democrats Republicans upset. Steve King, Republican representative from Iowa, told The Guardian that he expects bipartisan action to clarify the issue.

– People must know what going on in their name, but we must begin by Congress know what the heck is going on, says Democrat Elijah Cummings to The Guardian.

Outside the political sphere tries the alleged enterprises, which according to the leaked documents give the NSA access to large amounts of user data, by all means clear himself. It began with an open letter from Google in which it asks to be rid of her gag and to publish how many requests coming from the authorities. Google publishes similar statistics in its transparency report, but this type of cases that the scandal is all about is not listed there. Google’s requirements have been followed by similar from both Microsoft and Facebook.

Meanwhile, a new grassroots movement gained momentum, led by Mozilla and American activist organizations. The site stopwatching.us, has a hundred organizations and businesses signed a letter to the U.S. Congress calling for full transparency about the NSA surveillance, and individuals to do the same. The first day had 27 000 people have signed the lette r.