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24 Mar, 2014

German parliament confirms NSA inquiry to start in April – Deutsche Welle

Germany’s four major parties have unanimously approved a parliamentary inquiry into surveillance by the NSA. A German newspaper reported that whistleblower Edward Snowden, currently in Russia, may testify via Skype.

No parliamentarian voted against the establishment of a special Bundestag committee investigating the global spying activities of the National Security Agency NSA in the US and counterparts like the GCHQ in the UK. Another key question for the committee will likely be whether the German intelligence agencies were either aware of, or complicit in, the gathering of people’s data.

The four major German parties will all provide parliamentarians for the eight-person committee.” A society in which everything is monitored is not free,” committee chairman Clemens Binninger, a member of Chancellor Merkel’s Christian Democrats, said in parliament. “We do not want to live in such a society.”

Read the rest: German parliament confirms NSA inquiry, to start in April | News | DW.DE | 20.03.2014.