Quelle Surprise

Update: According to Zeit the BND supposedly removes German phone numbers and e-mails with the German top-level domain.  If that is true, the intelligence service "only" gives away personal data of Germans with a .net, .com, .org or any other TLD that isn't .de; additionally "only" Germans, who live abroad, are affected by the BND giving the NSA their IP addresses. So the BND is through negligence selling out Germans, who live abroad, use an e-mail that does not have the German TLD - either private or by working for any German firm that has chosen .com over .de. The BND just doesn't seem to care about those people, if they could be trusted to be telling the truth, that is. I have written that the might sell out Germans in Germany directly, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt, so I changed that part of the post.

Spiegel reports that the BND (federal intelligence service) is, in fact, one of the sources of German meta data gathered by the NSA. Of course, like any good intelligence service they told parliament that they only gave two data of German citizens sets  to the US service in 2012, to save people that had been abducted. GOOD BOYS! Another great example of how good parliamentary control functions if government officiall tell blatant lies, half truths, random, totally irrelevant stuff.


The former NSA facility in Bad Aibling, which is now run by the BND, is, according to the intelligence service, one of two facilities mentioned in documents obtained by Snowden. The BND also claimed that personal information of Germans is removed from the meta data.

The BND said, that it has "no indications that the NSA is gathering personal data of German citizens in Germany." This must be considered part of an ongoing operation of the intelligence service to sound utterly incompetent; and make terrorists feel save, only to strike out of nowhere.

This is just depressing. Let's read something about a German SWAT team storming the wrong apartment. That's at least a bearable, somewhat understandable level of incompetence.