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The article you are reading
originally appeared in German
in issue 27/2013 (July 1, 2013)
of DER SPIEGEL. |
Top secret documents detail the mass scope of efforts by the United States to spy on Germany and Europe. Each month, the NSA monitors a half a billion communications and EU buildings are bugged. The scandal poses a threat to trans-Atlantic relations.
At first glance, the story always appears to be the same. A needle has disappeared into the haystack -- information lost in a sea of data.
For some time now, though, it appears America's intelligence services have been trying to tackle the problem from a different angle. "If you're looking for a needle in the haystack, you need a haystack," says Jeremy Bash, the former chief of staff to ex-CIA head Leon Panetta.
An enormous haystack it turns out -- one comprised of the billions of minutes of daily cross-border telephone traffic. Add to that digital streams from high-bandwidth Internet cables that transport data equivalent to that held in Washington's Library of Congress around the world in the course of a few seconds. And then add to that the billions of emails sent to international destinations each day -- a world of entirely uncontrolled communication. And also a world full of potential threats -- at least from the intelligence services' perspective. Those are the "challenges," an internal statement at the National Security Agency (NSA), the American signals intelligence organization, claims.
Europe Reacts to NSA Spying
"The monitoring of friends -- this is unacceptable, it can't be tolerated. We're no longer in the Cold War." -- German Chancellor Angela Merkel
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Four-star General Keith Alexander -- who is today the NSA director and America's highest-ranking cyber warrior as the chief of the US Cyber Command -- defined these challenges. Given the cumulative technological eavesdropping capacity, he asked during a 2008 visit to Menwith Hill, Britain's largest listening station near Harrogate in Yorkshire, "Why can't we collect all the signals all the time?"
All the signals all the time. Wouldn't that be the NSA's ideal haystack? So what would the needle be? A trail to al-Qaida, an industrial facility belonging to an enemy state, plans prepared by international drug dealers or even international summit preparations being made by leading politicians of friendly nations? Whatever the target, it would be determined on a case by case basis. What is certain, however, is that there would always be a haystack.
A Fiasco for the NSA
Just how close America's NSA got to this dream in cozy cooperation with other Western intelligence services has been exposed in recent weeks by a young American who, going by outward appearances, doesn't look much like the hero he is being celebrated as around the world by people who feel threatened by America's enormous surveillance apparatus.
The whole episode is a fiasco for the NSA which, in contrast to the CIA, has long been able to conduct its spying without drawing much public attention. Snowden has done "irreversible and significant damage" to US national security, Alexander told ABC a week ago. Snowden's NSA documents contain more than one or two scandals. They are a kind of digital snapshot of the world's most powerful intelligence agency's work over a period of around a decade. SPIEGEL has seen and reviewed a series of documents from the archive.
The documents prove that Germany played a central role in the NSA's global surveillance network -- and how the Germans have also become targets of US attacks. Each month, the US intelligence service saves data from around half a billion communications connections from Germany.
No one is safe from this mass spying -- at least almost no one. Only one handpicked group of nations is excluded -- countries that the NSA has defined as close friends, or "2nd party," as one internal document indicates. They include the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. A document classified as "top secret" states that, "The NSA does NOT target its 2nd party partners, nor request that 2nd parties do anything that is inherently illegal for NSA to do."
'We Can, and Often Do Target Signals'
For all other countries, including the group of around 30 nations that are considered to be 3rd party partners, however, this protection does not apply. "We can, and often do, target the signals of most 3rd party foreign partners," the NSA boasts in an internal presentation.
According to the listing, Germany is among the countries that are the focus of surveillance. Thus, the documents confirm what had already been suspected for some time in government circles in Berlin -- that the US intelligence service, with approval from the White House, is spying on the Germans -- possibly right up to the level of the chancellor. So it comes as little surprise that the US has used every trick in the book to spy on the Washington offices of the European Union, as one document viewed by SPIEGEL indicates.
But the new aspect of the revelations isn't that countries are trying to spy on each other, eavesdropping on ministers and conducting economic espionage. What is most important about the documents is that they reveal the possibility of the absolute surveillance of a country's people and foreign citizens without any kind of effective controls or supervision. Among the intelligence agencies in the Western world, there appears to be a division of duties and at times extensive cooperation. And it appears that the principle that foreign intelligence agencies do not monitor the citizens of their own country, or that they only do so on the basis of individual court decisions, is obsolete in this world of globalized communication and surveillance. Britain's GCHQ intelligence agency can spy on anyone but British nationals, the NSA can conduct surveillance on anyone but Americans, and Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency can spy on anyone but Germans. That's how a matrix is created of boundless surveillance in which each partner aids in a division of roles.
The documents show that, in this situation, the services did what is not only obvious, but also anchored in German law: They exchanged information. And they worked together extensively. That applies to the British and the Americans, but also to the BND, which assists the NSA in its Internet surveillance.
Unimaginable Dimensions
SPIEGEL has decided not to publish details it has seen about secret operations that could endanger the lives of NSA workers. Nor is it publishing the related internal code words. However, this does not apply to information about the general surveillance of communications. They don't endanger any human lives -- they simply describe a system whose dimensions go beyond the imaginable. This kind of global debate is actually precisely what Snowden intended and what motivated his breach of secrecy. "The public needs to decide whether these policies are right or wrong," he says.
The facts, which are now a part of the public record thanks to Snowden, disprove the White House's line of defense up until now, which has been that the surveillance is necessary to prevent terrorist attacks, as President Barack Obama said during his recent visit to Berlin. NSA chief Alexander has sought to justify himself by saying that the NSA has prevented 10 terrorist attacks in the United States alone. Globally, he says that 50 terrorist plots have been foiled with the NSA's help. That may be true, but it is difficult to verify and at best only part of the truth.
Research in Berlin, Brussels and Washington, as well as the documents that have been reviewed by the journalists at this publication, reveal how overreaching the US surveillance has been.
Germany, for its part, has a central role in this global spying system. As the
Guardian newspaper, which is working together with Snowden, recently revealed, the NSA has developed a program for the incoming streams of data called "Boundless Informant." The program is intended to process connection data from all incoming telephone calls in "near real time," as one document states. It doesn't record the contents of the call, just the metadata -- in other words, the phone numbers involved in the communication.
It is precisely the kind of data retention that has been the subject of bitter debate in Germany for years. In 2010, the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe even banned the practice.
"Boundless Informant" produces heat maps of countries in which the data collected by the NSA originates. The most closely monitored regions are located in the Middle East, followed by Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. The latter two are marked in red on the NSA's map of the world. Germany, the only country in Europe on the map, is shown in yellow, a sign of considerable spying.
Read more:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/secret-documents-nsa-targeted-germany-and-eu-buildings-a-908609-2.html
'No Longer in the Cold War': Merkel Infuriated by US Spying
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has reacted strongly to SPIEGEL revelations that the US has been spying on Europe.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has compared US spying to Cold War tactics and Brussels wants EU facilities checked for American eavesdropping equipment. Concern is growing the scandal could seriously damage trans-Atlantic relations.
The German government reacted strongly on Monday to media reports that the United States has spent years spying on the European Union and on specific European countries. Meanwhile, European Union leaders have both reviled the US for allegedly bugging EU diplomatic missions in Washington, DC, and New York and ordered that bloc facilities be searched for American eavesdropping Equipment.
"The monitoring of friends -- this is unacceptable. It can't be tolerated," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Monday through her spokesman Steffen Seibert. "We are no longer in the Cold War." Seibert said that Merkel had already communicated her displeasure to the US. "Trust has to be the basis of our cooperation," Seibert said. "When it comes to this affair, trust has to be re-established."
In addition, Germany's Foreign Ministry is performing a check on the security of its communications with embassies abroad while the Interior Ministry in Berlin is undertaking an examination of the safety of communication channels used by the German government.
Europe Reacts to NSA Spying
"The monitoring of friends -- this is unacceptable, it can't be tolerated. We're no longer in the Cold War." -- German Chancellor Angela Merkel
The reactions are the clearest indication yet that Berlin and Brussels are taking reports seriously that the American intelligence service National Security Agency (NSA) spied on the EU and collected vast quantities of data from German citizens.
SPIEGEL reported on the surveillance over the weekend after having seen secret documents supplied by whistleblower Edward Snowden. It is just the latest in a series of allegations made by Snowden regarding the vast reach of US intelligence. In addition, the Guardian has reported that the NSA spied on several European countries, including France, Greece and Italy, in addition to other overseas allies.
'A Great Deal of Unrest'
Europeans are deeply unsettled as a consequence. "We expect rapid clarification from our American partners," said a spokeswoman for European Commission President José Manuel Barroso. "Of course we are worried, because if the allegations are true, it would create a great deal of unrest."
EU diplomats, with the active involvement of German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, spent much of Monday coming up with a joint response and reaction to the possible US spying. According to a statement from the Foreign Ministry in Berlin, Westerwelle spoke at length with Catherine Ashton, chief of EU foreign affairs, on Monday. "Both were in agreement that such activity among partners and friends in unacceptable," the statement read.
Ashton, who is in Brunei for a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), addressed the spying allegations with US Secretary of State John Kerry on the sidelines of that meeting on Monday. In comments to reporters in Brunei, Kerry appeared to play down the allegations. "I will say that every country in the world that is engaged in international affairs and national security undertakes lots of activities to protect its national security and all kinds of information contribute to that," Kerry told journalists there. "All I know is that is not unusual for lots of nations."
In Berlin, the German Foreign Ministry called in US Ambassador Philip Murphy on Monday for consultations. Brussels likewise called in the US ambassador to the European Union, William Kennard.
'A Touchy Issue'
French President François Hollande also voiced his anger at allegations published by the
Guardian that Paris had been a
target of US surveillance and spying activities. "We cannot accept this kind of behavior between partners and allies," Hollande said. "We ask that this stop immediately." Italian President Giorgio Napolitano added that "this is a touchy issue that requires satisfactory answers."
Beyond the sharp words, however, are concerns that the spying allegations could result in an immediate worsening of trans-Atlantic relations and perhaps even have negative consequences for negotiations over the trans-Atlantic free trade agreement which started last month. Several diplomats have suggested that talks should be suspended temporarily, including European Commissioner Viviane Reding on Sunday.
On Monday, German Consumer Affairs Minster Ilse Aigner expressed her own concern, telling SPIEGEL ONLINE that "we need better protection of private date, not more state surveillance. Otherwise, a free trade agreement makes no sense." European Parliament President Martin Schulz also indicated on Monday that the free trade agreement was in danger. "As a European and a representative of a European institution, I feel treated like the representative of the enemy. Is this the basis for a constructive relationship ...? I think not." He also compared the NSA activities to those undertaken by the Soviet intelligence agency KGB during the Cold War.
Schulz has also called a meeting of representatives of all the party groups represented at the European Parliament to discuss the wording of a potential EU resolution in response to the spying allegations. The Green Party in the European Parliament is calling for the EU lawmaking body to demand that the Commission examine possible legal action against the United Kingdom and the US relating to the surveillance and spying. Others are demanding the immediate creation of a parliamentary investigative committee at the EU level.
Merkels' unusually sharp words seem to have opened the gates for more reactions from her cabinet in Berlin. Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich in particular seemed eager to reverse earlier comments he had made about Prism in which he said that critics of US Internet surveillance were action out of a "mixture of anti-Americanism and naiveté."
Obama to Provide Information
On Monday, he changed his tune. "If suspicions are confirmed, it would be a burden on the trust between the EU and the US," he told German newsmagazine
Focus. "An apology would be unavoidable," he added.
German Economy Minister Philipp Rösler, who is also Merkel's vice chancellor, likewise vented his anger on Monday. "The energetic collection of data that we currently see from our partners in European and abroad is outrageous," he told reporters in Frankfurt. "We have understanding for combating terrorism," he added, but not for "aimless, indiscriminate and unrestrained spying on citizens."
Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger commented on the allegations of US spying on Sunday.
The US, meanwhile, is biding its time. US President Obama said on Monday in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania that his government is still looking at the revelations published in SPIEGEL. He said that once that examination is complete, the US will provide its allies with all of the information they are seeking.
With reporting by Veit Medick, Annett Meiritz and Philipp Wittrock
cgh -- with wire reports
