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Showing posts from December, 2014

German investigation of the cooperation between NSA and BND (II)

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This is part II about the German parliamentary committee which investigates NSA spying activities and the cooperation between NSA and the German foreign intelligence service BND . Here we provide summaries of the hearings of a number of BND employees, who provided some interesting details about satellite interception at the Bad Aibling station, the subsequent processing and storage of data and also about the cooperation between NSA and BND in the Joint SIGINT Activity (JSA). These summaries are based upon transcripts of a live blog, kept by volunteers of the German digital civil rights website Netzpolitik.org , who attended the hearings. The employees of the BND are designated by initials, not of their real names, but of those of the cover names they are using when at work(!). > See also: Introduction + Hearings, Part I The room where the hearings of the parliamentary committee take place (photo: DPA) 14th Meeting, September 25, 2014 ( Transcript ) - Hearing of the witness Mr. R.

Update on tapping German chancellor Merkel's phone

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(Updated: June 28, 2016) Over the last days, there were some new developments regarding the eavesdropping on the mobile phone of the German chancellor Angela Merkel , which was revealed in October last year. It was clarified that the record from an NSA database that was presented as evidence for this tapping, wasn't actually an original NSA document, but just a transcription. Also, this database record wasn't among the Snowden-documents. This means the information about monitoring Merkel's phone was not provided by Edward Snowden, but by another leaker, something that many people may not have been aware of. Criminal investigation In June of this year, the highest German public prosecutor ( Generalbundesanwalt ) started a criminal investigation against NSA regarding the alleged eavesdropping on chancellor Merkel. Last month it was reported that this case had been closed as no sufficient evidence had been found, but this was not fully correct. In his annual press conference