with very little digging, it turns out the German BND, their equivalent to the NSA, is doing the very same kind of spying/monitoring as the NSA. The NSA and the BND also share extensive info:
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Why are the media ignoring the NSA’s relationship with German intelligence?
As I wrote last week, cooperation between the American NSA and the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, is extensive and intimate. The German magazine Der Spiegel has done some worthy reporting on this. The NSA-BND cooperation angle was prominent in the German press over the summer, after Edward Snowden’s initial revelations about PRISM had first been reported. Der Spiegel revealed in July, based on Snowden’s pilfered documents and other sources, that the connections between the NSA and the BND are much tighter than previously thought and include extensive data sharing and the monitoring of phone calls and other electronic communications. The head of the BND, Gerhard Schindler, has acknowledged the relationship. Hans-Peter Friedrich, the German Interior Minister, expressed thanks for “information provided by our American friends” to thwart terrorist attacks, even as he and others claimed not to know anything about the agencies’ cooperation. Merkel includes herself in the axis of ignorance.
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http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/ro...-intelligence/
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The Europeans are happy to help the United States spy on everybody. They just won't admit it
The joint NSA-BND monitoring facility in Bad Aibling, which everyone is supposed to pretend doesn’t exist, is still operational. Gerhard Schindler, the BND’s chief, has essentially admitted to cooperation with the NSA before a European Parliament intelligence committee in July. The Bad Aibling site was crucial to the NSA and BND’s last joint venture on the controversial Echelon program. This too monitored mass communications and included spying by America, Britain, Canada and Australia, according to Der Spiegel. More recently, similar cooperation between European intelligence agencies and the NSA has been documented elsewhere in Europe, including Sweden.
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http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/ro...wont-admit-it/
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Mass Data: Transfers from Germany Aid US Surveillance
German intelligence sends massive amounts of intercepted data to the NSA, according to documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden, which SPIEGEL has seen. The trans-Atlantic cooperation on technical matters is also much closer than first thought
Day after day and month after month, the BND passes on to the NSA massive amounts of connection data relating to the communications it had placed under surveillance. The so-called metadata -- telephone numbers, email addresses, IP connections -- then flow into the Americans' giant databases.
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http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-914821.html
given the close ties between the German BND and the NSA, it is hard to believe the Germans themselves did not know the Chancellor's communications were being monitored.
sooooooo..do we now need someone to apologise on behalf of Germany?
