Civil Liberties

Germany Revealed as a Major Partner in NSA Surveillance

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel vehemently denied the country is a "surveillance state" after a magazine reported her government used a top U.S. National Security Agency spy program.

The German magazine Der Spiegel reported Saturday on Germany's utilization of an NSA system known as XKeyScore, which allows an agency to gather all of the unfiltered data a targeted individual has accessed over a specific period of time.

The XKeyScore program can, for instance, "retroactively reveal any terms the target person has typed into a search engine," DerSpiegel wrote in citing documents seen by its reporters.