Germans Vigorously Protest Massive British/ NSA Spying on Email, Telephone Calls

[unhappycamper]

http://www.juancole.com/2013/06/germans-vigorously-telephone.html

Germans Vigorously Protest Massive British/ NSA Spying on Email, Telephone Calls
Posted on 06/27/2013 by Juan Cole

The German government has demanded answers from the British state with regard to revelations by Edward Snowden that the British spy agency GCHQ has a program called Tempora that allows it to capture massive amounts of telephone calls and email from transatlantic fiber optic cables that land first in the UK before they extend to continental Europe.

250 US National Security Agency analysts also are assigned full-time to Tempora and 850,000 NSA workers and contractors have access to the gargantuan Tempora database.

Emails between two people inside Germany might nevertheless bounce around the world before being delivered, so that GCHQ could well be scooping up in-country data that happens to come through those cables. They are certainly collecting huge amounts of communications by Americans, but the US media for the most part has buried this story. ( Wired is an exception.)

East Germans were subjected to intensive domestic surveillance by the STASI secret police in the Communist period 1945-1989, and before that the National Socialists were not exactly shy about invading people’s privacy.

[Democracyinkind]

1. In Germany, all electronic communciations are stored for a certain time.

Therefore I'm not sure if the obejction is principled, or rather aimed at the fact the British/Americans are monitoring them. It's kind of redundant, as the Americans/Brits could ask for that stored data if they had a reasonable suspicion of a crime/terorism going on.

[jakeXT]

2. Providers have to store your IP adress, but not more

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retention