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Showing posts from May, 2015

New details about the joint NSA-BND operation Eikonal

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(Updated: January 24, 2016) This weblog first reported about the joint NSA-BND operation Eikonal on October 15, 2014, but meanwhile interesting new details became available from the hearings of the German parliamentary inquiry, and from recent disclosures by a politician from Austria. Under operation Eikonal, the NSA cooperated with the German foreign intelligence service BND for access to transit cables from Deutsche Telekom in Frankfurt. Here follows an overview of what is known about this operation so far. New information may be added as it comes available. - Initial reporting - Parliamentary hearings - - Disclosures from Austria - > See for the latest: Unnoticed leak answers and raises questions about operation Eikonal   Initial reporting Operation Eikonal was revealed by the regional German paper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the regional broadcasters NDR and WDR on October 4, 2014. They reported that between 2004 and 2008, the German foreign intelligence service BND had ta

German BND didn't care much about foreign NSA selectors

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(UPDATED: January 2, 2017) Over the last couple of weeks, the German foreign intelligence agency Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) was accused of helping the NSA by carelessly or even deliberately entering selectors used for spying on foreign targets in the German satellite interception system at Bad Aibling. Here, recent outcomes of the German parliamentary inquiry will be combined with information from the various press reportings, in order to provide a more integrated picture of what happened over the past years. It becomes clear that BND did everything that seemed reasonable to prevent that German data were passed on to the Americans, but that they didn't really care about whether NSA collected communications from other European countries. We also learned more about the selectors that are used for filtering communications traffic and it became clear that it is often difficult to determine the nationality of many types of internet identifiers. Information from the parliamentary