German FIS hands over data to NSA, except emails ending with .de | Hacker News Reader

German FIS hands over data to NSA, except emails ending with .de

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29 pointslukashed10 comments

Better translation of the important parts:

> "Before forwarding, personal data belonging to German citizens is removed in a stepped process," said a spokesman of the BND.

> According to information from ZEIT ONLINE, they for instance remove all e-mail addresses ending in .de and all phone numbers with the country code 0049 [Germany]

Which I would call purposefully incompetent.

I'm not even sure what this is supposed to achieve. They can't possibly believe that anybody will accept this as an honest effort to protect the personal data of German email users.

> they for instance remove all e-mail addresses ending in .de

Sehr lustig! As if a yahoo.com or gmail.com couldn't possibly belong to a German user!

As if the NSA needs Germany to get at emails on yahoo and google!

Sure, that goes without saying though.

There are also other German e-mail providers whose addresses don't end in .de - for example, GMX.net!

It seems, from this translation, that removing .de and 0049 information is only a part of the process. They probably do something else, but it is probably impossible to filter out most German's info.

Right, and we should hold them to their own standards. If they have the capacity to do all this surveillance, then I sure as hell expect that they know exactly who the email addresses they're passing on belong to. And they should be required by law to keep verifiable records ;).

It would be irrelevant, anyway. The G10 Act (which provides the statutory authority for the BND to collect the data) does not differentiate between citizens and foreigners.

Also, even assuming that sharing the metadata would be legal according to §7a of the G10 Act [1] (which would already stretching the intent of the law quite a bit), any such sharing would have to be documented and listed in the annual report of the parliamentary commission. Curiously, between 2009-2011, no data was supposedly shared with foreign agencies according to what the parliamentary commission reported.

Not that it would surprise anybody to catch the BND (yet again) with its hands in the cookie jar ...

[1] http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/g10_2001/__7a.html

As long as Germany allows the construction of huge NSA surveillance centers within its borders, I will consider this country NSAland.

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