Senior lawmakers in Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives pressed a reluctant justice minister on Tuesday to bring Germany into line with a European Commission directive on logging citizens' phone calls. Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger wants to restrict storage of information on Germans' telephone and internet usage to suspects in crime and terror investigations, and has declined to toe the EU line that all such data should be retained. The topic is sensitive in a country marked by a history of domestic spying by the Nazi Gestapo and communist East Germany's Stasi secret police. It has been a bone of contention between the coalition government's partners for months. Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) and their Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) favour unrestricted data storage, while Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger's less invasive stance is supported by others in her Free Democrats (FDP), the junior partner in the coalition. In its previous alliance with the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), the CDU/CSU drafted a law on storing all data for six months. Germany's constitutional court blocked that in March 2010 and ordered data already collected to be destroyed. Gerda Hasselfeldt, who chairs the CSU grouping in parliament, said on Tuesday the justice minister needed to draft new legislation that conformed with the EU directive and "her duties as minister". -- SPA
