Prism in Afghanistan: Conflicting Accounts By German Government

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http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-911952.html



The scandal in Germany surrounding spying activities by the United States' National Security Agency took a surprising twist on Thursday. A report by a German mass-circulation daily that described the use of a program called Prism in NATO-occupied Afghanistan has led to the German Defense Ministry contradicting the foreign intelligence agency BND.

It started on Wednesday when the broadsheet Bild reported that the American intelligence service NSA had deployed the controversial data-collection tool Prism in Afghanistan and that Germany's armed forces, the Bundeswehr, knew of the program by the autumn of 2011 at the latest.

German government spokesman Steffen Seibert, speaking on behalf of the BND, was quick to deny the Bild report. He said on Wednesday that the software which had been used in Afghanistan was part of "a NATO/ISAF program and was not the same as the NSA's Prism program." Seibert said the programs were "not identical." According to Seibert's account, there are two different Prism programs -- the much discussed NSA Prism program, which has been used in recent years to intensively monitor German communications, as well as an ISAF program for Afghanistan.

But the Defense Ministry is now contradicting that characterization. In a two-page memo obtained by several German media outlets, Rüdiger Wolf, a high-ranking ministry official, states that the Prism program used in Afghanistan is a "computer-aided US planning and information analysis tool" used for the coordination of "American intelligence systems," that is "operated exclusively by US personnel" and is "used Afghanistan-wide by the US side."