Tag Archives: NSA

The German Spy Scandal

Two years ago, after the NSA’s former contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations regarding the extent of U.S. electronic espionage in Europe, which allegedly included monitoring Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone, Germany was presented as a victim of aggressive intelligence gathering. However, it seems a new scandal arose recently that presents Germany as a willing accomplice in NSA’s intelligence gathering in Europe. According to these allegations, Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, carried out extensive surveillance at the request of NSA. Reports suggest that various European companies, institutions and individuals were targeted something that violates the German policy and law, since the type of information the BND is allowed to collect is strictly regulated by German law. According to the reports, BND provided signals intelligence for the NSA in more than 40,000 instances. Additionally, there are reports that claim that NSA have passed some 800,000 IP addresses, phone numbers and email addresses to the BND to monitor. These new allegations raised a lot of questions against the German government and its alleged contribution in authorizing BND to collect and share that kind of intelligence with NSA. This new scandal came as a godsend gift at the hands of the opposition that found a new tool to attack the Chancellor since she enjoys great popularity amongst Germans voters.

After the scandal was made public, BND halted any Internet-related intelligence sharing with the NSA. At the same time, the German parliament demanded a full list of all the companies, institutions and individuals that were deemed suitable to be spied on. The parliamentary committee proceeded in questioning Thomas de Maizière, the Interior Minister, behind closed doors. Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that she too would be willing to testify if the committee deemed necessary. However, the scandal is already harming Angela Merkel’s public profile since she came into power under the promise of competence and credibility. The German people feel deceived with the hypocrisy of the German government when back in 2013 when Germany was presented as the victim of aggressive intelligence Angela Merkel had said that ‘’spying among friends is not acceptable’’, and under these new allegations Germany nowadays does what it had denounced back in 2013. Austria announced that it filled a legal complaint against Germany over suspicions that its authorities and firms were among the targets of BND-NSA’s spying. Similarly, Airbus Group, an aerospace and defence manufacturer, is allegedly another one of the BND-NSA’s targets. After these allegations became public, Airbus announced that it plans to file a criminal complaint over the suspicion that BND aided the U.S carry out industrial espionage.

The BND is actively seeking a more substantial cooperation with NSA, since it relies on NSA intelligence. Especially now that BND needs to track German individuals travelling to Iraq and Syria and fighting for ISIS and similar terror groups and the subsequent return of these individuals back to Germany. This scandal seems to be based on BND’s efforts to increase the ties between the two intelligence agencies, even by using means and methods that would have been controversial if they ever became public knowledge, as it happened. However, the method that BND choose to promote this collaboration, with or without the German government’s knowledge as it is not clear yet, actually sabotaged its goals since it made the Germans suspicious against the United States and make it harder to promote intelligence sharing between the two countries beyond the minimum necessary.

This is not the first time such allegations have been made against BND, since in March 2014, the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper published an article that claimed that BND supplied the NSA with German citizen’s communication data from 2004 to 2008, in a project under the code name ‘’Eikonal’’. This new scandal is coming amid concerns how to balance the need for surveillance during a time where the threats against the state have multiplied and are of increased complexity. The national governments are struggling to find the balance between the need for security and the protection of the individuals’ privacy rights.

The main problem with this scandal is not based upon whether BND and NSA are collaborating in terms or intelligence sharing, but whether they exchange intelligence concerning areas well beyond anti-terrorism activities that are promoted under the need of securing German people. Additionally, through this scandal surfaced the question whether the German government knew about BND’s extended activities and if it did something to prevent it or put a halt on it. Since this is not an isolated incident the German government finds it especially difficult to persuade the public that it was ignorant of BND’s collaboration with NSA in spying on European targets. On top of that, and despite the government’s denials of being involved and its willingness to help clear up the scandal, members of Germany’s ruling parties delayed a decision on whether lawmakers should get access to secret lists detailing the extent of Germany’s intelligence cooperation with the United States. The lawmakers demanded these lists since they include search terms the NSA asked of BND to look out for while eavesdropping on international phone and data traffic.

This scandal goes along with the latest trend that finds the states trying to increase their surveillance powers under the justification of the new forms of security threats that have arose. They promote the necessity of these more intrusive measures that should be adopted even if they operate against the individuals’ privacy rights. France’s lower house recently adopted a sweeping new spying bill that would give French intelligence the power to deploy hi-tech tools such as vehicle tracking and mobile phone identification devices against individual without judicial oversight. Moreover, before the British elections, Prime Minister David Cameron had promised to authorise British intelligence agencies to read ‘’all messages sent over the Internet’’ in a package of legal provisions named as the ‘’snoopers’ carter’’ by its opponents. Germany is not an exception as it tries to increase its surveillance abilities against the security threat posed by individuals fighting alongside terror groups and many German nationals that are returning from Iraq and Syria and could potentially organise attacks inside Germany. However, BND’s actions brought the German people’s outrage both against the agency and against the German leadership, complicating the government’s plan towards the adoption of a legislation that would increase BND’s powers as it happened in other European countries. Furthermore, this scandal became another tool for the German opposition to attack Chancellor Angela Merkel inside Germany since she is already facing a lot of criticism regarding the way she handles the Greek economic crisis and the Ukrainian crisis.

Barack Obama Announces Changes To IC Spy Programme

In light of last year’s Snowden intelligence leaks, United States President Barack Obama is expected to order the National Security Agency (NSA) to stop storing data from Americans’ phones.   After initially defending the US surveillance programme, in August, the president announced that the US “can and must be more transparent” about its intelligence gathering.

Reports in Washington have indicated that during a speech set for Friday, which is scheduled to take place at the Department of Justice at 11:00 (1600 GMT), President Obama will request Congress to arrange how data is stored and how the US Intelligence Community (IC) will have access to it.   The storing of phone data is just the first in a number of planned changes to the intelligence system that the president is due to announce.  The proposed changes within the IC and how the community gathers its intelligence stem from former intelligence worker Edward Snowden’s continued leaks of information pertaining to the NSA’s spying programme.  The latest revelations made by Mr Snowden, who is wanted for espionage in the US and now lives in exile in Russia, claim that US intelligence agencies have collected and stored 200 million text messages every day across the globe.  According to Mr Snowden, an NSA programme, known as Dishfire, was responsible for extracting and storing data from SMS messages in order to gather location information, contacts and financial data.  The information was later shared with the United Kingdom’s spy agency GCHQ.  While both agencies have defended their activities, stating that they operate within the constraints of the law, many advocates and civil rights groups have called on greater transparency.

President Obama is expected to approve a number of recommendations put forth by a panel that the White House commissioned last year.  If approved, the centrepiece of reforms will be an order to stop the NSA from storing Americans’ phone records.  Storage of such data will instead fall to firms or another third party where it can be queried, however under limited conditions.  In terms of how this will be implemented, the president is expected to leave this decision to Congress and the IC.

Amongst the other proposals that are likely to be approved is the creation of a public advocate position at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), where government agencies request permission for mass spying programmes.  Currently, only the US government is represented in front of FISC judges.   In turn, Mr Obama is also expected to extend some privacy protections for foreigners, increase oversight of how the US monitors foreign leaders and limit how long some data can be stored.

According to White House spokesman Jay Carney, the aim of these proposals and changes is to make intelligence activities “more transparent,” adding that this would “give the public more confidence about the problems and the oversight of the programmes.”  However while in the wake of the Snowden leaks, civil rights groups have been requesting significant reductions to powers that government agencies have with respect to the collection of data, many believe that these latest proposals appear to be structured in a manner of broad rules, effectively meaning that they will do little to limit the intelligence-gathering activities of the US IC.

Edward Snowden and the Leaks that Exposed US Intelligence Programme

In May 2013, Edward Snowden, a former contractor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) left the US shortly after leaking to the media details of extensive internet and phone surveillance carried out by the US IC.   Mr Snowden, who has been granted temporary asylum in Russia, faces espionage charges in the US over his action.

By early June, the scandal of the US spy programme broke when the UK Guardian newspaper reported that the NSA was collecting telephone records of tens of millions of Americans.  At the time, the newspaper published the secret court order, which directed telecommunications company Verizon to hand over all its telephone data to the NSA on an “on going daily basis.”  The newspaper report was later followed by revelations in both the Guardian and Washington Post that the NSA had tapped directly into the servers of nine Internet firms, including Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Microsoft.  This was done in order to track online communication through a surveillance programme known as Prism.  At the time, Britain’s GCHQ was also accused of having gathered information on Internet companies through Prism.

Several days later, it was revealed that Mr Snowden, a former CIA systems analyst, was behind the leaks pertaining to the US and UK surveillance programmes.  He was later charged by US authorities with theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defence information and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence.

The spy scandal continued to develop when on 21 June, the Guardian reported that officials at GCHQ were taping fibre-optic cables, responsible for carrying global communications, and sharing vast amounts of data with the NSA.  At the time, the paper also revealed that it had obtained documents from Mr Snowden, which indicated that the GCHQ operation, codenamed Tempora, had already been running for eighteen months.   According to reports, GCHQ was able to monitor up to 600 million communications every day throughout that period, with information gathered from the Internet and phone use allegedly being stored for a period of thirty days where it would be sifted and analysed.

A week later, on 29 June, claims by Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine emerged that the NSA has also spied on European Union (EU) officials in the US and in Europe.  At the time, the magazine reported that it had seen leaked NSA documents confirming that the US had spied on EU internal computer networks in Washington and at the 27-member bloc’s UN office in New York.  The files, all provided by Mr Snowden, also allegedly suggested that the NSA had conducted an electronic eavesdropping operation in a building in Brussels, where the EU Council of Ministers and the European Council were located.  While it remains unknown as to what information the US IC may have obtained in the operation, reports have suggested that details pertaining to European positions on trade and military matters may have been obtained.

On 24 October, Italian weekly L’Espresso reported that the NSA and GCHQ had been eavesdropping on Italian phone calls and Internet traffic.  The revelations were later sourced to Mr Snowden.  It is alleged that three undersea cables with terminals in Italy were targeted in the operation.  That same day, the German government summoned the US ambassador after German media reported that the NSA had eavesdropped on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone.

French President Francois Hollande also expressed alarm at reports that millions of French calls had been monitored by the US.  In all, the Guardian later reported that the NSA had monitored the phone calls of thirty-five world leaders.  In turn, according to a secret file leaked to the Guardian, a total of thirty-eight embassies and missions had been the “targets” of US spying operations.  On 1 July, it was reported that amongst those countries targeted by the operations were France, Italy, Greece, Japan, South Korea and India.  EU embassies and missions both in Washington and New York were also reported to be under surveillance.

On 10 July, it was revealed by Brazil’s O Globo newspaper that the NSA had ran a continent-wide surveillance programme.  At the time, the newspaper had cited leaked documents which indicated that at least until 2002, the NSA had ran the operation from a base in Brasilia, seizing web traffic and details of phone calls from around the region.  The newspaper further indicated that US agents worked with Brazilian telecoms firms in order to eavesdrop on oil and energy firms, foreign visitors to Brazil and major players in Mexico’s drug wars.   By September, specific claims that the emails and phone calls of the presidents of Brazil and Mexico had been intercepted were revealed.  This prompted Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff to cancel a state visit to the US, the first high-profile diplomatic move since the scandal unfolded.

By mid-August, documents leaked to the Washington Post revealed that the NSA broke US privacy laws hundreds of times every year.   Later that month, the Washington Post reported that the US IC had a “black budget” for secret operations, which in 2013 had amounted to US $53 billion.

After fleeing to Hong Kong, Edward Snowden confirmed to the South China Morning Post that the NSA had led more than 61,000 hacking operations worldwide, which included many operations in Hong Kong and mainland China.  He indicated that targets in Hong Kong had included the Chinese University along with public officials and businesses.