Thank you Kate,
this is an important resource for UE citizens.
A quite extensive and documented coverage on the NSA-BND issue has
appeared in English on the Electrospaces blog following the hearings.
You may be interested in connecting with them and link their articles.
<http://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2014/11/german-investigation-of-cooperation.html>
<http://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2014/12/german-investigation-of-cooperation.html>
<http://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2015/01/german-investigation-of-cooperation.html>
<http://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2015/05/german-bnd-didnt-care-much-about.html>
<http://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2015/05/new-details-about-joint-nsa-bnd.html>
Bests,
Alberto
On 17/09/2015 03:59, Kate Krauss wrote:
Hi Liberation Tech,
I visited a German hacker conference recently, and it gradually became
clear to me in talking to privacy advocates that the NSA has a very
unhealthy relationship with German intelligence.
It seems that the NSA is colluding with German intelligence agencies
(the BND and others) to spy on German politicians, journalists, and
citizens.
An inquiry committee of the German Parliament is in the midst of a
major investigation to
get to the bottom of this
. It’s also trying to learn whether the US is planning illegal drone
strikes
from German soil. And tapping the Internet directly in Munich to send
data about Germans directly to the NSA.
There are even allegations that German intelligence agencies are
exchanging citizens’ personal data for expensive surveillance
equipment paid for by the NSA
. And the roof of the US embassy in Berlin seems to be an NSA
listening post (I guess that's not unusual). Then there's the undersea
cable.
The Germans working on this investigation in Parliament are frustrated
that news about it isn’t really reaching the international community.
Spy agencies for the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia may also
be involved (FVEY). But the NSA is by far the best funded and most
powerful among them—Edward Snowden revealed that the US intelligence
budget was $52 billion in 2013.
The central issue, however, is whether Germany, in bowing to the
requests of the NSA, could be gradually turning over its independence
to the United States. This is an outrageous claim—but if you let a
foreign government spy on your head of government, Chancellor Merkel,
and members of
your
Parliament, and you intimidate German journalists who try to cover the
story (two were recently investigated for treason)—at what point does
that cross a bright line? And if the US has co-opted Germany, one of
the most powerful countries in Europe—which other less powerful
countries does it own, right now, in secret?
A tiny group of interested Germans and Americans has launched a web
site (GermanTransparency.org) and a
Twitter account (@GermanInq) to track this investigation and share
information about it with English-speaking journalists, activists, and
technologists.
Please read the blog post and news reports on the web site, and follow
us on Twitter. The next hearings of this inquiry committee will be
held in Berlin on September 2
4, so you have a few days to get up to speed. Berlin is six hours
ahead of New York. The hashtag for the inquiry is #GermanInq.
Thanks,
Kate Krauss
for GermanTransparency.org
@GermanInq
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