Cover Story: How the NSA Targets Germany and Europe

[xchrom]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/secret-documents-nsa-targeted-germany-and-eu-buildings-a-908609.html


United States President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin: The questions that need to be addressed in the NSA scandal are serious. Can a sovereign state tolerate a situation whereby a half a billion pieces of data a month are stolen on its territory from a foreign country? A country which has been identified its target as a "third party" and, as has become clear, can be spied on at any time?


The facts shown in the documents leaked by Edward Snowden (shown here in a broadcast on a train in Hong Kong) disprove the White House's line of defense up until now, which has been that surveillance is necessary to prevent terrrorist atacks. At best that is only part of the truth. Documents reviewed by SPIEGEL show how overreaching US surveillance has been.

At first glance, the story always appears to be the same. A needle has disappeared into the haystack -- information lost in a sea of data.

For some time now, though, it appears America's intelligence services have been trying to tackle the problem from a different angle. "If you're looking for a needle in the haystack, you need a haystack," says Jeremy Bash, the former chief of staff to ex-CIA head Leon Panetta.

An enormous haystack it turns out -- one comprised of the billions of minutes of daily cross-border telephone traffic. Add to that digital streams from high-bandwidth Internet cables that transport data equivalent to that held in Washington's Library of Congress around the world in the course of a few seconds. And then add to that the billions of emails sent to international destinations each day -- a world of entirely uncontrolled communication. And also a world full of potential threats -- at least from the intelligence services' perspective. Those are the "challenges," an internal statement at the National Security Agency (NSA), the American signals intelligence organization, claims.

Four-star General Keith Alexander -- who is today the NSA director and America's highest-ranking cyber warrior as thie chief of the US Cyber Command -- defined these challenges. Given the cumulative technological eavesdropping capacity, he asked during a 2008 visit to Menwith Hill, Britain's largest listening station near Harrogate in Yorkshire, "Why can't we collect all the signals all the time?"

[KoKo]

1. If we can invade other countries territory with Drones...why not with Data Collection?

We seem to be able to do whatever we want with our USA power.

But, we are told that other countries are in agreement with our drone strikes and assume that means that other governments are happy for us to spend our taxpayer dollars on doing surveillance for them.

What a strange new world....this Globilization where USA runs the show.

[xchrom]

3. +1 -- it is a strange new world. proportionality is a thing of the past.

'massive' is the new new.

[dkf]

2. "Why can't we collect all the signals all the time?"

And there it is...the future of it all. Frightening.