German intelligence agency halts Internet monitoring for NSA | Hacker News Reader

German intelligence agency halts Internet monitoring for NSA

dw.de

120 pointsmattjaynes32 comments

German Spiegel reports, that mostly European agencies and diplomats were being spied on by the NSA with the help of the German Intelligence Agency, but

"Schindler [Head of Germany intelligence agency] tries to play it down: Most european agencies and most diplomats from the EU don't communicate through unsecure emails. Connections over a Vpn would prevent the capturing of emails by the BND [German intelligence agency]"

And obviously, no terrorists would ever use a Vpn.

Source: http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/bnd-kann-daten-wei...

Over VPN - but is that key exchange safe? Is that proprietary crypto system in use at $diplomacy backdoored with a weak RNG?

Good, the more political fallout, the better.

These kinds of cold shoulders are the language of diplomacy and power. In some small abstract way, the US's ability to defend itself has been reduced by this action-- power has been reduced. The power players in the government will take note of this, and ultimately tiny intangible reductions will be unsustainable and policy will have to change.

Yes, vulnarabilities are corrective measures.

This becomes clear when official are too safe in their seat. Power corrupts.

Nothing should be undefeatable. In this context, making a country vulnarable - to some degree - can be good.

While I don't disagree that it is a strong political move, and an appropriate one, I have seen no proof that any of the NSA's operations have made the USA materially safer.

"Being safe" does not matter as much as "having power" does.

Well, once you're one of the people in power...you'll have a staff of people whose sole job is to ensure you stay safe.

Everybody else? Something about eating cake, I think...

I agree, but I like to think about these things in the terms the government does, which includes a lot of paranoid fear produced by false and frequently cynically malicious assumptions.

Like I said, the difference in actual security here is abstract, difficult to quantify, and potentially nothing practically speaking.

there has been an attack - look how understaffed we are! we need more budget! and more control and surveillance!

there has been no attack - look at how good we're doing our job of protecting you. but just to be sure, we need more surveillance.

What about the other side of the coin though?

there has been an attack -see! the NSA can't even prevent single incident X and are doing NOTHING to protect us!

there hasn't been a large scale terrorist attack in north america in 13 1/2 years -there is no evidence that NSA is doing anything to protect America!

> there hasn't been a large scale terrorist attack in north america in 13 1/2 years -there is no evidence that NSA is doing anything to protect America!

0 in 13.5 years is not (especially considering that "large scale terrorist attacks" can only occur in integer units) substantially below the long-run historical average.

So, yeah, that, in and of itself, is not really any kind of evidence of any success of any changed policy since the last attack.

Large scale no, but there was the bombings at the Boston Marathon in 2014.

Here's the problem with the Boston Marathon attack; it was planned and conducted by US citizens in the USA without any planning with any foreigners.

When someone says "the NSA couldn't even stop the Boston Marathon bombing", they are implying that the NSA SHOULD have been able to. But for the NSA to be able to stop it, they would have to be collecting data on US citizens inside the USA.

You can't have it both ways. You can't blast the NSA for not being able to stop Boston but then also be against them doing domestic collection. The fact that they couldn't stop Boston shows that they weren't spying on Americans (even though one was on watchlists).

this game is not about being safer (that's what the USA government sells to their citizens), it's about political and industrial espionage, and building a database of dissenters for the future.

The question here is, if it is only a temporary halt until the dust has settled. As much I read in the source, phone calls and faxes are still submitted, so it appears to me very half-hearted.

I know, that the German intelligence agency "BND" always wanted to have a more tight corporation with the NSA.

There is a significant difference between the collaboration of surveillance of fax and telephone on one side and the internet on the other side. In the former case, specific justification was and is needed for each selector. In the latter, case that was not the case.

Are you sure? I'm not. Who controls what the BND is doing? Oh, yes, I know, they report to a group of politicians, right. They already admitted, that they are overworked and have not the facilities to check up the BND. Also, the BND already lied to parliament ... I guess, the BND is likely worse controlled than the NSA and the NSA has still more control over the BND than our own parliament, since the NSA is in the same building as the BND surveillance team, the politicians from parliament are not (they are hundreds of miles away in Berlin).

No, I'm not sure.

I just read that the BND-officials said that they are overworked, too - since years.

There seem to be systematic issues in the German intelligence services.

I guess, they have to much to do, spying on people.

And we want them to spy on some people. But supervised and controlled by the parliament.

Right at the end of the article is an interesting statement:

  The report said the NSA had equipped the listening station 
  in Bad Aibling with sophisticated technical equipment. A 
  number of NSA personnel are believed to work there together 
  with some 120 BND personnel.

The point here is that NSA personnel are on secondment or implants to use another term. Having implants encourages complacency. You end up with scenarios like:

   Bob (NSA): hey Klaus, can you add these new selectors to the filters please?

   Klaus (BND): Ja, when do you want that? Tomorrow ok? I'll get Alice to run them tomorrow. You still want to come to the summer party this weekend?

Familiarity in security scenarios is dangerous. Implants breed familiarity.

Happy to hear this, as an expat living in Berlin and being very concerned with the current NSA situation.

I'm also happy to hear this.

If another spy agency wants to know something they always have to state exactly what and why. Then, for each case, can be decided if help is given or not.

Foreignly spying is a criminal offence and must be prosecuted.

If it was ever different then there are serious fundamental problems that must be fixed.

Same here. Privacy issues are something that boosted Berlin's (and German in general) startups or at least gave them an opportunity for easy marketing -- "we are not in five eyes". Now it's kind of awkward.

By the way, the pictured building (new BND headquarters) is in my neighborhood; I cycle past it nearly every day.

On the other side of the building there are two conspicuous palm trees; really tall and green, they even survived winters. I always joke these are actually antennas in disguise but who knows.

You might be right:

http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/#/beitrag/video/2396252/Van-R...

I wonder what the fee for is for intentional damage of a public tree (hoping it would not be a "good tree, that would not be nice to damage). Worth trying? :)

It's behind a tall fence. You'd probably be in a bigger trouble for trespassing.

Now on to UK, Sweden, Spain, France, etc to make them do the same.

Newest news from Germany: An important information artifact that was needed to illuminate this topic, was deleted. So, it should be clear, that the BND did not change, but somebody is now hushing up the whole topic.

(German) Source: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/NSA-Ausschuss-BND-hat...

"it's a good rule never to leave documentary evidence if you can help it, because you don't know when it may be put in."

    - from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

This seems like a common theme with intelligence agencies, building datacenters to store petabytes, but no one can spare a 2TB external to store the list of selectors that were queried.

(I mean, there really aren't too many options here. Either they did store the data and deleted it, in which case the person in question and everyone up the chain in command committed treason, or they just don't store queried selectors, in which case 1) the program is probably illegal, 2) they are incompetent if they don't monitor what the 'allies' query. Intelligence agencies have no allies, that is the whole point of their existence.)

Yeah, just because it's a major topic in German media...

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