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German Intelligence Helped NSA Spy On EU Politicians and Companies
An anonymous reader writes: We've known for some time already that intelligence agencies operate beyond rules, laws, and regulations. Now, we learn that the NSA and the German intelligence service, BND, lied and withheld information about misuse from the German Chancellor's Office.
"The BND realized as early as 2008 that some of the selectors were not permitted according to its internal rules, or covered by a 2002 US-Germany anti-terrorism "Memorandum of Agreement" on intelligence cooperation. And yet it did nothing to check the NSA's requests systematically. It was only in the summer of 2013, after Edward Snowden's revelations of massive NSA and GCHQ surveillance, that the BND finally started an inquiry into all the selectors that had been processed. According to Der Spiegel, investigators found that the BND had provided information on around 2,000 selectors that were clearly against European and German interests. Not only were European businesses such as the giant aerospace and defense company EADS, best-known as the manufacturer of the Airbus planes, targeted, so were European politicians—including German ones.
However, the BND did not inform the German Chancellor's office, which only found out about the misuse of the selector request system in March 2015. Instead, the BND simply asked the NSA to make requests that were fully covered by the anti-terrorism agreement between the two countries. According to Die Zeit, this was because the BND was worried that the NSA might curtail the flow of its own intelligence data to the German secret services if the selector scheme became embroiled in controversy.
"The BND realized as early as 2008 that some of the selectors were not permitted according to its internal rules, or covered by a 2002 US-Germany anti-terrorism "Memorandum of Agreement" on intelligence cooperation. And yet it did nothing to check the NSA's requests systematically. It was only in the summer of 2013, after Edward Snowden's revelations of massive NSA and GCHQ surveillance, that the BND finally started an inquiry into all the selectors that had been processed. According to Der Spiegel, investigators found that the BND had provided information on around 2,000 selectors that were clearly against European and German interests. Not only were European businesses such as the giant aerospace and defense company EADS, best-known as the manufacturer of the Airbus planes, targeted, so were European politicians—including German ones.
However, the BND did not inform the German Chancellor's office, which only found out about the misuse of the selector request system in March 2015. Instead, the BND simply asked the NSA to make requests that were fully covered by the anti-terrorism agreement between the two countries. According to Die Zeit, this was because the BND was worried that the NSA might curtail the flow of its own intelligence data to the German secret services if the selector scheme became embroiled in controversy.
it we don't reign this in no one will be free.
German intelligence has been interested in a closer alliance with the "Five Eyes" group of US-led intelligence agencies, which originally consisted of the main anglophone countries (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand). When it was expanded in 2009 to "nine eyes" with the addition of Denmark, France, Netherlands, and Norway, there was supposedly some grumbling from Germany about being left out.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
And when the NSA needs help interpreting intercepted technical data, for example, it subcontracts with local 'domain experts'. In the aviation biz, that would be Boeing. So Airbus, good luck with those bids for aircraft sales.
If you think that a large part of what the NSA and CIA do isn't plain old economic espionage, I've got swamp land in Florida to sell you.
Have gnu, will travel.
This is why they didn't make a bigger deal of the Angela Merkel eavesdropping by the US. They were doing the same thing.
Damn, lots of Stasi victims are still of working age even. You'd hope the Germans had developed more antibodies against this crap.
To say NSA lied is not supported by the articles linked in the summary. We have enough to criticize NSA about without exaggerating the facts to fit our desire to believe it is a monolithically monstrous organization whose agents use the U.S. Constitution for toilet paper. And when we go beyond the facts, any legitimate criticism is diluted, because what we say is easily swept aside as a pile of prejudice from conspiracy theorists.
The BND didn't do its job of actually reviewing the selectors. Much like U.S. congressional and judicial oversight both failed to reign in controversial NSA programs. I can't help but wonder sometimes what the Americans at NSA think about all this. Call me heretical, but I bet at least some of them are motivated by a desire to thwart the next 9/11, and want to do so in the right way, too. But intelligence is a contact sport, and laws and executive orders are often ambiguous. So are they like the athletes that have to ratchet up the aggression until the officials start calling penalties before the limits are truly known?