Documents Reveal Close Cooperation Between NSA, German Intelligence

Snowden strikes again

Chancellor Angela Merkel has repeatedly said she knew nothing about American surveillance activities in Germany. But documents seen by SPIEGEL show that German intelligence cooperates closely with the NSA and even uses spy software provided by the US.

It was a busy two days for the surveillance specialists of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency. At the end of April, a team of 12 senior BND officials flew to the United States, where they visited the heart of the global American surveillance empire: the National Security Agency (NSA). The purpose of their mission can be read in a "top secret" NSA document which SPIEGEL has seen -- one of the trove of files in the possession of whistleblower Edward Snowden.

According to the document, BND President Gerhard Schindler repeatedly expressed an "eagerness" to cooperate more closely with the NSA. The Germans, the document reads, were looking for "guidance and advice."

Comments

[A Serious Man]

Wasn't 'The Lives of Others' supposed to be set in totalitarian East Germany?

[Acheron]

Cooperation, and perhaps, even some guidance from a once-hopeful, sinister, world dictatorship to the next... We'll have a lot in common before it's all over.

[Inigo M.]

Indeed we will, or at least you will do a very good job PRETENDING you have a lot in common with everyone else, lest you end up in a mental institution or a gulag. Or maybe the nonconformists will just end up as soylent green.

[Inigo M.]

So first they got "guidance and advice" or at least inspiration from the East German Stasi, and now they are expected to "give back" to a unified Germany. Well, I guess that's only fair.