Berlin, July 22 (ANI): A German weekly news magazine, Der Spiegel has revealed that the German foreign intelligence service and its domestic intelligence agency are the 'most prolific partners' of US led NSA's secret surveillance program.
According to Der Spiegal, Germany's BND and BfV allegedly used the spying program of NSA called XKeyScore intended to 'expand their ability to support NSA to jointly prosecute counterterrorism targets'.
The XKeyScore program is a productive espionage tool and it is aimed at collecting metadata including retroactively revealing any terms the target person has typed into a search engine and also allows the system to receive a 'full take' of all unfiltered data over a period of several days.
Der Spiegel found that the BND is tasked with instructing the domestic intelligence agency on how to use the program and of up to 500 million data connections from Germany accessed monthly by the NSA, a major part is collected with XKeyScore.
In the NSA documents revealed by Der Spiegel, BND had been working to influence the German government to relax interpretation of the privacy laws to provide greater opportunities of intelligence sharing and the German partners showed willingness to take risks and to pursue new opportunities for cooperation with the US.
Meanwhile, German chancellor Angela Merkel denied the country is a 'surveillance state' and added that Germany is a country of freedom but sometimes with regards to counterterrorism and espionage, 'the ends don't justify the means'.
Der Spiegal said that both the German intelligence agencies the BND and BfV refused to discuss the espionage tool and NSA too denied to comment. (ANI)
|
|
Comments:
