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.
