German Chancellor Angela Merkel is under enormous pressure to reveal how much she knew about the country's co-operation with the US National Security Agency in spying on industrial and diplomatic targets.
In an effort to distance herself from the spying scandal after it was alleged she knew about her own government's co-operation with the NSA, despite publicly criticizing it, she called for an independent inquiry under leading judge Kurt Graulich who was called on to scrutinize a list of targets handed to the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) by the US.
The first report from Graulich raises serious allegations against the United States, suggesting that the intelligence-sharing agreements between the NSA and BND have been broken and that the extent of the NSA program was much broader than the German Government would allow. Many of the targets, he found, were against the interests of Germany and its European partners.
According to Der Spiegel newspaper, Graulich investigated 39,000 keywords used by the NSA in a period from 2005 to March 2015. These included search terms — known as selectors — with which the NSA crawled international communication.
auch kein Thema mehr…? #BND #NSA #Merkel #CDU #Medien pic.twitter.com/QR9xLIxgBa
— Hope (@hope_no1) October 6, 2015
The reports says that the German intelligence agency was given the selectors by the NSA and ran searches which were not covered by German law, which is very strong on data privacy.
US Spied on Allies
Nearly 70 percent of the screened selectors concerned the authorities of EU countries, says the report.
"Whole staffs of European governments were the target of American spying. Nearly 16 percent of the selectors were related to telecommunications subscribers in Germany, which are protected by the Basic Law against spying through their own intelligence services," the paper reported.
Graulich said he had asked the NSA for an explanation into what appeared to be illegal surveillance but had not received a response. Cooperation between the NSA and BND was "neither transparent nor controllable for the German side," he concluded.
Der BND spioniert also mit Hilfe der NSA die USA und andere Länder aus? #NSAUA #nospy NSA = USA? pic.twitter.com/96InxhhBFp
— maxris (@maxris0804) October 14, 2015
The spying affair dates back to 2013 when it was alleged that the NSA had even bugged German Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone.
This prompted her spokesman Steffen Seibert to say she had phoned US President Barack Obama saying she expected the Americans "to supply information over the possible scale of such eavesdropping practices against Germany and reply to questions that the federal government asked months ago."
Obama promised her the US was "not monitoring and will not monitor" her communications but German diplomatic sources said they were still not satisfied with the White House's explanation.
It emerged later, however, from sources including former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, that the US embassy in Berlin, overlooking the Reichstag, was being used as a base for a special unit of the CIA and NSA to monitor a large part of cell phone communications in the government district.
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| 0 | Edit | Delete That is now absolutely ridiculous as all these guessing if she knew or not if she was involved or not are absolutely stupid and are insult of our intelligence. Fact the matter is that after the WW2 CIA crated BND and it was fully controlled by CIA. Later when NSA come about BND was officially transferred to NSA and now we have situation that 7000 NSA and CIA operatives are working in Germany. About 1500 of them are working directly in BND premises and according to the contract they are responsible directly to NSA and Chancellor. Just last year Merkel signed a authorisation of close cooperation between BND and NSA. Now telling that she did not know what was going on is extremely insulting for all ordinary Germans. Let me emphasise that BND on NSA request collected all data from computers from the strategic companies such as Siemens, SAP, Bosch, military complex Krauss-Maffei and other. They were stealing their top secret research data and transfer them to USA where our competitors were all of a sudden able to make same products as we had, which was mildly said very surprising as USA counterparts are too stupid to discover anything really valuable.
Show new comments (0)slimyfox
Angela Merkel knew about blanket mass surveillance as her reaction on information was cool without anger and surprise. It looked as that she knew all the time what was happening. Only later we learned that it was exactly like that. And how she was able to go away with it so easy? That is now famous German public laziness and geocentricism as people do not care for as long as we are “officially” living better than other do (which is lie beyond imagination as there are at least 7 countries where living standard is much higher than here). Mass media is playing immensely important role in it and the only way to awake these people is to attack media on every step, create debate evenings in Berlin by Russian Embassy and discus Our media lies, Truth will eventually start to trickle and people will become aware that the truth is different than presented.
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