Who’s the leader of the club
That spies on you and me?
N S A B N D M O U S E!
Germany’s foreign intelligence agency is officially lifting the lid on some of its worst-kept secrets by acknowledging that half a dozen facilities are in fact spy stations.
“Diese Aufgaben gehören zum Kernauftrag des Bundesnachrichtendienstes und beruhen auf gesetzlicher Grundlage. Zu diesen Aufgaben stehen wir, weshalb wir zukünftig auf die Legendierung dieser Außenstellen im Inland verzichten.”
But don’t tell anybody you heard it from me.
It goes like this: The BND is soon going to start monitoring users of social networks like Facebook and Twitter in something they are referring to here as “Echtzeit.” “Echtzeit” can roughly be translated as “real-time” and means that said users will be monitored – now get this – live. That’s right. Like while it’s actually happening?
Let me repeat this so you will understand the implications of what it is I’m saying here: They will actually be seeing what these people are typing while they are actually typing it. Just like you and I and everybody else on Facebook and Twitter the world over are doing already, I mean. Like how creepy is that?
Befreundete Nachrichtendienste seien methodisch viel weiter
And it looks to me like they’re trying to save on energy these days or something.
Hey, who needs the NSA when you’ve got the Telekom right here at home in your own backyard in Germany? Doing the wiretapping, I mean.
Hello? Hello out there! Where’s all the excitement about this? The Telekom just got a little more transparent and admitted that it taps 50,000 phone connections a year. It hands out information on a million IP addresses annually, too. No, not to the NSA. To certain German “state agencies” that wish to remain unnamed.
Well there is a big difference here, you know. The difference being, of course, that the Telekom “sticks to the rules” and no one here has any reason to doubt them because the Telekom would not lie to us, I mean you, and besides, Germans snooping on Germans in a country like Germany when not following the rules precisely and to the letter is absolutely unimaginable and thoroughly ausgeschlossen (impossible). Here, I mean.
Die Telekom ist verpflichtet, in bestimmten Fällen mit Behörden zusammenzuarbeiten. Wie viele Anfragen es jährlich gibt, erstaunt dann doch. Neben tausenden überwachten Telefonanschlüssen gibt die Telekom Daten zu fast einer Million IP-Adressen preis.
But will most likely be introduced again at a much later date once hell freezes over.
The United States and Germany had been negotiating over mutual rules for intelligence-gathering aimed at each other, but there still appears to be “some gaps that need to be worked through.”
It seems Angie Merkel suddenly had more important things to say than talk about the NSA during her latest stay in the USA. Hey, that rhymes.
“We do not have a blanket no-spy agreement with any country.”
1) Chinese intelligence agencies have apparently carried out a spy attack on the federal government of Germany. Yawn.
2) Some 16 million email addresses and passwords of 600 government employees at every German ministry have been taken in a massive data theft operation. The attack was carried out by eastern European criminals, according to Der Spiegel. Snooze.
When asked for more detailed information, a German government spokesman replied “More detailed information. Of what? Like who cares? It’s not as if these attacks were carried out by the NSA or anything.”
Researchers declined to speculate about the possible origin of the malware, but noted that none of the victims were from China.
PS: As for this year’s Berlinale, hmmm. The Chinese just won the Golden Bear for best film this year, too. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
Some long-established film festivals, such as Cannes and Venice, can legitimately claim to be timeless. Berlin, however, seems to be stuck in the past, and not only because the event somewhat coasts on its bygone reputation as a festival of discovery…
The Berlinale’s 64th edition was the most lukewarm in years. You don’t usually expect swoons and scandals here, but you do hope that every year’s competition will bring one major discovery, or at least an unassuming gem that everyone falls in love with. There was one universally adored film in competition – but it doesn’t quite count as a Berlin revelation, as it came straight from wowing Sundance…
Berlin always provides its share of A-list red-carpet promenades – this year, by the likes of George Clooney, Bill Murray and Uma Thurman – yet these never quite disguise the festival’s essential earnestness…
Otherwise, I suspect that Berlin 2014 will be best remembered for its major innovation – the addition of a pop-up line of gourmet food wagons. Festival-goers will turn up undeterred again next year – but many of them will be doing it less for the films than for this Berlinale’s real discovery, the pulled pork baps.
My how time flies. Especially when it’s only been fifteen minutes.
For the rest of us, I mean. Edward Snowden still has a whole lot more time on his hands.
The European parliament is to ditch demands on Wednesday that EU governments give guarantees of asylum and security to Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency whistleblower.
In Brüssel ist ein Vorstoß von Grünen und Linken gescheitert, dem Whistleblower Schutz in der EU zu gewähren. Der Innenausschuss des EU-Parlaments stimmte gegen den Antrag.
As Washington said it would announce reforms to its National Security Agency (NSA) later in the week, German media were already focused on a likely disappointing outcome for Berlin in talks on a “no spy” arrangement.
Oh, I dunno. Other than Washington not promising to stop listening in on politicians’ calls or say when they are listening in on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone (or whoever else) or not allowing the Germans access to an alleged listening post on top of US embassy in Berlin, I’d say those “no spy” arrangement talks are moving along pretty well.
Doch der Fehler liegt woanders: in einer naiven Erwartungshaltung. Dass die Drahtzieher des 11. September aus Hamburg kamen, ist den Amerikanern immer noch präsent. Dass es zahlreiche Deutsche gibt, die sich nach Syrien aufgemacht haben, um dort an der Seite von Islamisten zu kämpfen, ebenfalls.
Just when it appeared as if the lastest wave of hysteria about personal privacy violations by the NSA was subsiding in Germany, a local man in the small southern German town of Oberscheißheim has stumbled accross what appears to be a vast treasure trove of illegally acquired private data carelessly left hanging in the town’s telephone booth.
Although in German and ostinsibly published by the “Deutsche Post,” personal privacy experts are nevertheless convinced that this could only be the work of the NSA. The secred database, in book form, is said to contain a a detailed, unencrypted listing of all of the town’s residents, to include name, address and telephone number, and would have been freely accessible to anyone entering the booth had not the quick-thinking resident who discovered the ghastly privacy violation not ripped it from the small metal chain it had been attached to.
“I felt it was my duty to inform the local authorities immediately,” the man later said when being questioned, prefering to remain anonymous, of course, with a paper bag over his head. “And I shudder to think about all the other secret databases possibly out there just like it, in communities just like our own, just waiting to be discovered and accessed by perfect strangers.”
“And in closing, I must say that I also get the creeps when I think about what the NSA is going to do to that poor careless agent of theirs who left the thing hanging there in the first place. What a dumb ass.”
The NSA has a secret unit that produces special equipment ranging from spyware for computers and cell phones to listening posts and USB sticks that work as bugging devices. Here are some excerpts from the intelligence agency’s own catalog.
Concerned Germans everywhere (note the red scarf) weren’t quite concerned enough to actually offer poor and misunderstood professional leaker/Russian tourist Edward Snowden political asylum, but now they all hope in unison that Brazil will (tons of Germans have found refuge there in the past, you know).
Otherwise those awful henchmen/bogeymen from that horrible homeland of his might just get him and, well, we don’t even want to THINK about what could possibly happen to him then!
Ex-NSA-Mitarbeiter Edward Snowden will auf seiner Flucht vor den Häschern seines Heimatlandes offenbar nach Brasilien weiterreisen.
And maladaptive reaction. Berlin, a counterculture paradise? I guess. A privacy haven? Keep on dreaming.
But it’s a lot more than that. Berlin has always been a place to hail heros who aren’t heros. That’s why this Snowden asylum nonsense fits like a glove here.
An international cadre of privacy advocates is settling in Germany’s once-divided capital, saying they feel safer here than they do in the United States or Britain, where authorities have vowed to prosecute leakers of official secrets…
One wants to be glad that Berlin (and Germany) is a sanctuary for people who have been subjected to inappropriate, excessive snooping by U.S. and U.K. authorities. Still, it’s always worth it, I think, to be a little skeptical of individuals, or groups, or cities and countries whose attitudes carry a whiff of neurotic impulse and maladaptive reaction. Berlin positively reeks of it…
It is an ironic twist for a sometimes-bleak city that was once better known as a backdrop to John le Carré novels.
Observing Hermann 