Newsletter 2013/07/08 – Friend and Foe
BERLIN/WASHINGTON (Own report) – New reports are confirming the close
cooperation of the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) with the
National Security Agency (NSA). According to these reports, BND agents
have repeatedly visited the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade to discuss
technical issues. The NSA has also furnished the BND instruments for
analyzing intercepted data. A former head of the Austrian intelligence
service has confirmed that it was a “common understanding among all
European intelligence services” to be “aware” of the NSA Prism
surveillance program. Already years ago, officials of the US military
have been quoted saying that the US military espionage center that is
being established in the Hessian capital Wiesbaden – and that will
reportedly also be used by the NSA – is destined to gather information
“on the current situation of friend and foe, and everything that can
influence our mission.” The German government has also admitted that
the Western block’s cooperation of the intelligence services – which
includes abduction and torture of suspects in the so-called war on
terror – dates back to secret agreements between the leading NATO
powers during the post-WW II decades. more
Newsletter 2013/07/03 – Allied Services (II)
BERLIN/WASHINGTON (Own report) – Already 25 years ago, the German
Federal Intelligence Service (BND) had had extensive knowledge of the
wide-ranging espionage activities of the NSA in West Germany. This has
been exposed in a rather recent reprint of a 1989 news article.
According to this article, the NSA was already feeding information to
German intelligence agencies that they, themselves, were unable to
generate. As experts confirm, the BND is today not operating so
fundamentally different from the NSA. In fact, like the US agency, the
German agency not only has wiretapping installations installed
directly at domestic service providers, it also spies on governments
of sovereign nations, for example, on Afghanistan and possibly Syria.
The new telecommunications law, which took effect at the beginning of
the week, opens to the agencies also access to so-called inventory
data of German users. Experts consider parliamentary control over the
agencies to be totally insufficient. Just a few years ago, the current
Minister of Finances had made a plea to abolish parliamentary control
commissions. more