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German secret services have ramped up surveillance of online communications in the fight against terrorism. A new report reveals the authorities accessed 37 million emails and data connections in 2010 - five times as many as in 2009. “Bomb,” “nuclear” and “rocket” were all keywords used by German intelligence agencies to flag up and monitor 37,292,862 emails and data connections last year, the Bild newspaper reported on Saturday. The figures came from a report by the Parliamentary Control Commission, which oversees the activities of the country's secret services. Three authorities, the domestic intelligence the Verfassungsschutz, the foreign spy agency the BND and the Military Counter-intelligence Service currently have access to online communications data in order to identify terrorists, arms dealers or traffickers. Over the course of one year German intelligence agencies plugged in around 2,000 keywords relating to terrorism, 13,000 weapons dealing terms and 300 on trafficking. Despite this large scale mass surveillance, the operation only led to valuable information in just 213 cases. The parliamentary report was published just hours after Friday’s ruling by the German Constitutional Court demanded a change in the law on authorities accessing user passwords. The court ruled that existing law on the storage and access to user names, passwords and PIN codes by intelligence agencies was a breach of the basic right to privacy of personal information guaranteed in the German constitution. Lawmakers have until June 2013 to clarify the rules. Source Thanks for reading DJ
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CIA spied on allied BND American spies have been keeping tabs on their Teutonic counterparts for decades – not only the East Germans of the Cold War, but also allied West Germans, according to newly released documents. US intelligence agencies collected highly personal information on their allies, according to a report in weekly magazine Focus on Monday. Staff at the Central Intelligence Agency were expected to keep tabs on communist East German spies during the Cold War, but US documents show they were doing the same to their supposed friends at West Germany's Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). Office politics within the BND as well as details of personal factors such as alcoholism and infidelity were carefully noted, as well as health information such as which agents had suffered heart attacks, the magazine reported. One file entry even records the wooden leg of an aristocratic West German agent. Even after the fall of communism in 1989, the spying continued into the 1990s, with those BND agents with a Nazi past in particular attracting attention. Two former SS members were drafted into a sabotage unit of NATO, according to the papers. The files also suggest the tapping of some telephone calls with the Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz), Germany’s domestic intelligence and security authority. Conversations with other security services in Paris and London were also tapped, Focus reported. The BND did not seem surprised by the idea of being spied upon by the CIA, with a former BND counterintelligence expert telling the magazine that he and his colleagues had often thought such operations were being undertaken. When asked whether he thought the CIA was still spying on the BND, he replied using a suitably spooky phrase, saying, “The cat does not let the mouse free.” Source DJ
