Snowden Reveals NSA got Huge Data Sources from Germany
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Snowden leaks: Germany sent massive amounts of data to the NSA
German Chancellor Angela Merkel
The most recent update from the Edward Snowden cache that German magazine Der Spiegel obtained shows that Germany’s Federal Intelligence Agency (BND) sent "massive amounts" of data to the National Security Agency (NSA).
A Der Spiegel report based on the documents reveals that about 500 million pieces of phone and email communications metadata collected by the NSA in Germany last December was apparently provided by the BND.
The latest revelation in the NSA saga follows release of information about theXKeyscore program that allowed US intelligence officials unrestrained access to the online activities of users all over the world. It suggests a closer relationship between Germany's BND and the NSA and will raise questions about the sincerity of the protests by the German government following previous revelations that the NSA was spying on its European allies.
According to reports, the BND shared information with the NSA "day after day and month after month," passing "massive amounts" of telephone and email metadata to its American counterparts.
The NSA obtained 500 million pieces of phone and email data from Germany's BND foreign intelligence service in December 2012 alone at two sites in Germany as part of an operation dubbed "Germany - Last 30 days."
The Snowden documents appear to identify the Bavarian BND facility at Bad Aiblingas one of the two collection sites. Der Speigel's investigations, which were corroborated by BND sources, show the code name of the Bad Aibling facility appears in the Snowden documents as one of the signals intelligence activity designators (SIGADS) that the NSA used to collect the data.
A BND source confirmed to Der Spiegel that the code name was "associated with telecommunications surveillance in Afghanistan."
German opposition party leaders such as Hans-Christian Stroebele of the Green Party, have expressed outrage and called for full investigations into the nature and scope of the information communicated. But the BND claims it sent the metadata legally and that it did not include information about German citizens.
Deutsche Welle reports that BND officials said foreign phone and email metadata was collected within the scope of the functions of the BND and was therefore legal. The officials also said that there was nothing unusual or new about their cooperation with the NSA. The BND has been working with the Americans for decades.
According to a report by the BND, it has worked “for over 50 years together with the NSA, particularly when it comes to intelligence on the situation in crisis zones. The cooperation with the NSA in Bad Aibling serves exactly these goals and it has taken place in this form for over 10 years, based on an agreement made in the year 2002.”
The G-10 law, which limits the scope of activities of the BND, prohibits it from monitoring the communications of German citizens. The agency collects only foreign intelligence. The data it passed to the NSA reportedly included millions of records including thousands of emails, obtained from satellite telephone and mobile communications providers in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
The claim that the information shared with the NSA included only information that came from the Middle East and Afghanistan could help to limit objections.
According to a report by the BND, "The NSA benefits from this collection, especially the...intercepts from Afghanistan, which the BND shares on a daily basis."
But part of the outrage is in relation to the fact that the NSA was supposed to have vacated the Bad Aibling site in 2004 and hand full control to Germany.
Stroebele, a member of the German parliament's intelligence oversight committee, expressed the shock of many of his colleagues saying: "Now we are reading that the NSA expanded their facility there, received data on site and also analyzed it there. That is a completely new development; that’s news that we have to follow up on." He added, “[This] requires immediate investigation."
Stroebele and his colleagues on the committee are exasperated that they had to learn about such massive data transfers to the NSA through the Der Spiegel report.
He said, "Why has that not long since come to light in parliament, in the parliamentary control committee, but also to the public at large? The government is playing the wrong game there."
However, Wolfgang Bosbach, CDU member of parliament, who chairs the Committee on Internal Affairs, has attempted to provide an explanation. He saidthat, "Two situations are getting jumbled together here," noting that the BND never denied that it was passing data to the NSA.
Bosbach said that the hearings in the parliament had never been about whether the BND was sending data to the NSA, but whether data pertaining to German citizens was being sent. He insisted that the BND never sent data including information about German citizens to the NSA and that the matter the Der Spiegelreport covered did not claim that such data was sent.
He said: "The transfer of data clearly did not involve German citizens but rather data that the BND had collected in accordance with its statutory mission."
The BND maintained that it was not aware that the NSA ever collected personal data about German citizens living in Germany.
According to Deutsche Welle, BND representatives said: "Before the transfers, data is cleaned in a multi-step procedure of any personal data relating to German citizens."
Gisela Piltz, a Free Democrat (FDP) politician, however thinks that the anger of the opposition leaders was misplaced. She said opposition party leaders should not blame the government of Angela Merkel and the Chancellery Minister Ronald Pofalla about the situation in which a false impression was given that the NSA had vacated the Bad Aibling facility.
She argued that the situation should be blamed on Pofalla's predecessor, Frank-Walter Steinmeier of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). She said that Steinmeier should have informed the intelligence oversight committee about the goings-on at the Bad Aibling facility.
"In my view, the opposition has only itself to blame,” Piltz said. “Pretending to be the firefighter just to be caught as the arsonist - you can't play both of these roles with any credibility.”
The Snowden documents give insight into the extent of cooperation between the BND and the NSA. The Germans were allowed access to NSA's XKeyscore tools and the NSA showed interest in the BND surveillance programs which it rated as highly effective.
But the latest revelations have raised questions about what Merkel's government knew about the US surveillance programs before the Snowden leaks, especially in the light of her earlier claim that she knew nothing about BND's collaboration with the NSA.
If Merkel truly was in the dark about Bad Aibling, then the question that will be asked is what other vital facts about information sharing between both agencies is she also in the dark about.
JOHNTHOMAS DIDYMUS is based in Lagos, Lagos, Nigeria, and is an Anchor for Allvoices.
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