1ST LEAD Newspaper:
German intelligence also spied on Austria for the US By dpa correspondents
Europe
01.05.2015
By our dpa-correspondent and Europe Online auf Facebook posten Auf Twitter posten
Berlin (dpa) - The US National Security Agency (NSA) used Germany‘s foreign intelligence service to spy on Austria, according to a report due to be published in Sunday‘s edition of Bild newspaper.
German media had previously reported that the NSA used the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND, to spy on high-ranking officials in the European Commission and in France‘s Foreign Ministry and presidential palace.
After
an investigation into the search terms given by the NSA to the BND to
use at its monitoring station in the Bavarian town of Bad Aibling, words like "gov," "diplo" and the German equivalent of "federal office" were discovered.
These search terms resulted in 12,000 hits, according to an internal BND email from August 14, 2013. The hits included material from the government of Austria, which like Germany is a federation and, therefore, covered by the same search term.
The Bild article, an advance copy of which was seen by dpa, said Austria then appeared in more than 10 requests from the NSA.
The affair has led to a split in Germany‘s governing coalition as the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) has attacked its partners in the centre-right Christian Democratic and Christian Social unions (CDU and CSU).
"The supervision by the chancellery over the BND seems to have failed miserably," SPD general secretary Ysmin Fahimi was quoted by Friday‘s edition of the Passauer Neue Presse newspaper as saying in a direct attack on Chancellor Angela Merkel, who leads the CDU.
"The chancellery, which has been led by the CDU for 10 years, bears the responsibility for the German secret service behaving properly," she said.
Fahimi also raised questions about Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, who is accused of lying to parliament over the affair.
"If the accusations are true, I do not rule out personal consequences [for de Maiziere]," she said.
The opposition Greens have called for a parliamentary committee to investigate the affair.
Government sources told dpa Friday that the spying
scandal had taken on great political dimensions and resignations at the
BND or within the government could not be ruled out.
A former government insider sharply criticized how the affair has been handled so far in a report in Focus magazine Friday.
"Everyone is beating up the BND at the moment, mostly for ideological reasons," the chancellor‘s former secret service coordinator Bernd Schmidbauer was reported as saying.
"This is how we will destroy our security in this country," he said.
Referring to BND president Gerhard Schindler,
he said: "It is a disgrace how he has been deserted by these men in the
chancellery when really it should be their most noble duty to give him
encouragement at this time."
He said Germany‘s cooperation with US intelligence services was essential.
"We are nothing without the intelligence service insight of the Americans," said Schindler, who coordinated the secret service in the 1990s. "We are like headless chickens."
The first accusations came to light last week that the NSA had used the German intelligence agency to spy on European firms and politicians on its behalf.
The NSA asked the BND to use its huge computer servers to monitor web traffic and look for keywords, IP addresses of computers and names. The BND told the chancellery years ago that the searches were probably illegal under German law.
The magnitude of the scandal, the biggest to hit the BND in its 59-year history, remains unclear.
All of the search terms requested by the United States since the beginning of the cooperation in 2002 were checked only once. Even that task was enormous. The Sueddeutsche Zeitung, NDR and WDR reported that alone in 2013, 690,000 telephone numbers and 7.8 million IP searches were requested.
http://en.europeonline-magazine.eu/1st-leadnewspaper-german-intelligence-also-spied-on-austria-for-the-usby-dpa-correspondents_389986.html
COMMENT
The US spies on Germany but it also gets Germany to do its spying.
The former secret service coordinator Bernd Schmidbauer is using the "we will destroy our security in this country" line of attack.
Much
noise is made by politicians, but this is likely to go the way of the
previous NSA spy scandals: it will be swept under a rug.
Most appalling of all, Schmidbauer says:
"We are nothing without the intelligence service insight of the Americans."
On
the contrary, it sounds like the US spy agency would be nothing without
getting everyone around the world to do their spying for them.
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Capping off:
On behalf of NSA and, apparently, in violation of German law, German BND spied on:
- European Commission
- France
- Austria
Interior Minister accused of lying to parliament cover up.
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Airbus’ legal step targets spying on it
By The Associated Press
Posted: May 2, 2015 at 1 a.m.
BERLIN — European aviation company Airbus said Friday that it’s taking legal action after reports that it was targeted by German and U.S. intelligence agencies.
The company, which makes civilian and military aircraft and is a fierce rival of U.S. manufacturer Boeing, said it will file a criminal complaint with prosecutors in Germany against “persons unknown.” That’s a common procedure in Germany which requires authorities to investigate.
“We are aware that as a major player in this industry we are a target for intelligence activities,” the company said in a statement. “In this particular case there appears to be a reasonable suspicion of alleged industrial espionage. We are alarmed by this and have therefore asked the German government for information and we are in dialogue with them.”
Airbus said it was made aware of the allegations by press reports and didn’t have any information of its own on the matter.
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