U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has received an open letter from the European Union Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding the other day. Ms Reding is appealing to the U.S. authorities to comment on their Secret Service’s actions within the Prism as well as other American programs pertaining to accessing and processing of personal data. Moreover, the EU commissioner is asking for more information about the laws that permit such programs realization. The European Union is hoping for quick and reasonable answers to some questions. For example, whether this surveillance program is aimed only at EU citizens; whether the data collected to specific and individual cases; what the determined criteria for such controlling procedure are; and what the scope of this snooping program, which violates the EU residents’ rights for privacy protection, is. Angela Merkel is planing to discuss this issue with Barack Obama at the meeting in Berlin next week. German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberg says that the scale of this spying is rather worrying. The minister also adds that these measures are not just antiterrorist. Such actions and their desirable goal could not be justified by any means.
Recently, the U.S. Intelligence Agency has already been put in the crosshairs by the journalists, when the American authorities claimed for the direct access to the servers of nine major U.S. firms such as Google, Facebook, Apple, and Yahoo!.