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Comment by lispm | Hacker News Reader

You have no clue. The BND helped the NSA to spy on GERMANS and GERMAN companies. Plus EUROPEANs.

It's not the job of the BND to help the NSA to spy on Germany and the EU.

> We spy on our best allies and you'd better believe they spy on us. We just happen to have the evidence of the US doing it thanks to Snowden.

Look, the difference is this: we have literally THOUSANDS of NSA, CIA and US military agency personal in Germany. There are huge official installations of the NSA, the CIA and US military in Germany. Instead of respecting the host country, they are spying on us, collecting data, manage their wars, disrespecting our laws, ...

There is nothing, absolutely NOTHING, even remotely comparable done by Germany in or around the US.

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> The BND helped the NSA to spy on GERMANS and GERMAN companies.

Didn't know that part. Thats an interesting twist. I could understand them working together against someone else but not against themselves. Must be part of that "Five eyes" cooperation thing Snowden was talking about.

Oh, but Germany isn't part of the five eyes alliance. I think that's what hurt us the most. Our government really believed in a German/American alliance. And then we found out we didn't belong into the inner circle.

And now the politicians finally realized what it means to give a foreign power access to your internet nodes. Sure we need the cooperation, but my guess is the politicians and the executive organs could not imagine the NSA would use this to harm our economy.

fiveeyes is hardly a secret. It's existence isn't even classified. For example, I've sat in presentations with nationals from many countries, and the non-fiveeyes members would occassionally be asked to leave the room at the end to allow the fiveeyes nations to divulge some further information. But the other nations were told before leaving that the next part of the presentation was fiveeyes only.

German companies are very unhappy.

http://www.dw.de/airbus-to-press-charges-on-nsa-bnd-spying-c...

Airbus has both civilian and military development and production in Germany.

If I understand this correctly, Boeing (US) and Airbus (EU) are competing head to head for extremely valuable contracts. The NSA tasks the BND to spy on Airbus employees and the company in order to maintain Boeing's competitive edge over Airbus. In doing so, threatening the jobs of fellow Germans (and other Europeans).

Is that more or less what has been going on?

This is exactly whats going on, the NSA tried to get their selectors inside the BND snooping program and were partly succesful with this.

And when the BND noticed that a few thousand of these selectors were succesfully installed, they informed the german chancellery who miracly done... nothing at all to protect us against industrial spionage.

And they dont care about all the other stuff the US is committing from germany, like conducting their drone wars which make germany a legal war target.

The actual extent is still unknown. There is a possibility that industrial secrets have been transmitted, but there's no proof or even allegations of a particular case which has happened. I'd rather know more details before passing judgement.

There is enough evidence that the NSA does industrial espionage against Germany and Europe. Whether the BND was stupid enough to help them, remains to be seen.

The NSA has given target data to the BND and the BND has then handed over the collected intelligence about these targets to the NSA.

The check who were the targets, was a joke. There were literally millions of selectors and a quick check already delivered thousands of selectors which were directly against German interests.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundestrojaner

So get upset with the BND then. That would at least have a chance of your anger actually achieving something, instead of waving your fist at the NSA from across the ocean, because frankly, they don't really care what German citizens think.

> instead of waving your fist at the NSA from across the ocean, because frankly, they don't really care what German citizens think.

If the NSA doesn't care what the Germans think, why do they spy on them? ;-) [pun intended]

Seriously: The NSA really cares about the BND cooperating with them:

> http://www.danisch.de/blog/2015/04/23/der-bnd-und-die-nsa/ (in German, sorry)

And if, because of a giant public outrage, this "cooperation" will be stopped, the NSA will not like this situation. Thus, indirectly, the NSA cares a lot, what the Germans think.

In English, the idiom "Don't care what they think" means "don't care what they feel". Though I understand how that might lead to miscomprehension from non-native speakers ;)

That's not an idiom, and the two sentences have two very distinct meanings.

> instead of waving your fist at the NSA from across the ocean

You still don't understand.

The NSA is here. In my country. With huge installations. Officially. Together with the CIA and US military.

Example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagger_Complex

We even paid partly for it(!).

Time for them to go home.

I do understand. My country (Australia) has US spy bases in it too ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Gap ), which they have also used to spy on Australians. In Australia's case (and I would be willing to bet that it's the same for Germany), it was a quid pro quo arrangement. Australians spy on Americans and pass the information to the NSA. Americans spy on Australians and pass it to the Australian spy agencies - thereby avoiding restrictions on domestic spying. Seriously, your problem is with the BND, not NSA, because NSA is going to spy on you regardless of whether you want them to. It's pretty much their job. You just don't want the BND actively helping them, which is why your energy should be directed towards them.

I want the NSA to leave Germany. They can spy where they want, but not from within Germany.

If you are German, the NSA likely won't listen to you.

The German government is responsible for the presence of the NSA and it has the means to largely end NSA activities in Germany, but not the will.

You may want to talk to your government about that as they are the ones enabling it.

That's not all the US is doing in Deutschland. "[T]he slides show that the facilities at Ramstein perform an essential function in lethal drone strikes conducted by the CIA and the U.S. military in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Africa."[0]

So it is not just spying on the EU that is being enabled by Germany's government, it is the entirety of the US drone program that is being used across the Middle East and north Africa. This program, operating as it does outside of declared war zones, is very probably illegal under German law.

[0]https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/04/17/ramstein/

> This program, operating as it does outside of declared war zones, is very probably illegal under German law.

I highly doubt that as most German laws don't apply to US military stationed inside Germany (SOFA exemptions).

What I suspect is actually not "helping", but rather "blind trust" -- e.g. just having an arrangement with the US where the US sends in "selectors" and the Germans send over the data; and nobody competent/willing to screen the selectors the US sends in ahead of deploying them.

I think there are strong incentives to turn a semi-blind eye to what the US is sending in (or what is going out) -- until shit hits the fan...

It's presumably the job of the BND to collect information about threats to Germany. If they've determined that the most effective way for them to achieve that is to submit to the NSA completely and beg for whatever scraps USA is willing to leave them, there's a fair chance that is true. If you question that assessment, that means you are questioning their competence at espionage, which doesn't bode well for their ability to collect the information themselves without the NSA's help.

I'm not sure you have actually basic understanding what the current discussion is about.

That's okay. I am.

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