It turned out that the information about spy activities of the US and Great Britain was known to the German government since 2001.
"As early as in May 2001, twelve years before the revelations made by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, German security authorities knew about the spying activities of the US intelligence agency NSA and the British intelligence service GCHQ," German magazine Der Focus wrote, referring to WikiLeaks documents.
Another document stated that the US and British intelligence services carried out "targeted" espionage activities to learn more about political decisions made in the German capital. In particular, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Federal Police knew about the existence of the camouflaged aerials in the embassies of the USA and Great Britain, with the help of which the governmental quarter could have been extensively spied on.
The documents showed "that not only was the NSA spying on the whole world, but it had also partnered with the intelligence services of particular states to spy on their citizens and those of the surrounding regions. One of these countries is Germany, which has had a close relationship with the US in military and intelligence matters since its occupation by US forces in WWII. The US has been shown to use its bases in Germany and its relationship with German intelligence to spy on German citizens as well as European Union institutions," a WikiLeaks statement said.
Recently, WikiLeaks published 2,400 documents on the NSA spying affair, according to which Germany's Federal Intelligence Service (BND) was involved in the creation of the spy software that was later used by the NSA to tap top-ranking officials. It was also said that BND used the software in its work.
