RIO DE JANEIRO

Journalist says Snowden has ‘blueprint’ of NSA

The Guardian journalist who first reported Edward Snowden’s disclosures of U.S. surveillance programs says the former National Security Agency analyst has “very specific blueprints of how the NSA do what they do.”

Glenn Greenwald says Snowden has “literally thousands of documents” that constitute “basically the instruction manual for how the NSA is built,” but that Snowden has insisted details from the documents not be made public.

Greenwald says he doesn’t think national security would be harmed if the secret documents were to be published, but he added that he did think revelations from them could harm the U.S. government.

Greenwald, who closely communicates with Snowden, spoke to The Associated Press on Sunday from Rio de Janeiro, where he lives.

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BERLIN

Chancellor Merkel urges stronger data protection

German Chancellor Angela Merkel called Sunday for tougher European and global rules on data protection amid fallout from recent revelations about U.S. surveillance programs.

Merkel pledged that Germany will take a “very strict position” in ongoing talks on European Union-wide data rules. Germany will push for those rules to oblige companies such as Google and Facebook to tell European countries who they share data with, she told ARD television.

The chancellor also suggested that a protocol on data protection could be added to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a U.N. accord that dates back to 1966. She didn’t give details of what exactly that protocol might entail.

Germans are sensitive about protecting their personal data. Ahead of September elections in which the conservative Merkel is seeking a third term, the center-left opposition says her government isn’t doing enough to address those worries and confront the U.S.

Germany’s top security official, Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich, met in Washington on Friday with Attorney General Eric Holder and Vice President Joe Biden. He declared himself satisfied with the meetings and stressed the need to prevent attacks, saying afterward that a U.S. program called PRISM searches in a “very targeted” way for terrorism-related information.

– From news services

 


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