NSA in Germany: Why We Are Posting Secret Documents

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/why-spiegel-is-posting-leaked-nsa-documents-about-germany-a-975431.html


Graffiti art is seen on a wall near the headquarters of the British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham.


In the wake of the NSA scandal, the relationship between Germany and the United States has been rocky. When the first Snowden leaks emerged last summer, Chancellor Angela Merkel's government declared the affair over before it even got going. But when Berlin learned last autumn that Merkel's private cell phone had been monitored, the trans-Atlantic relationship hit a new low. There were discussions of possible consequences and of changes being necessary in the way Germany approached its North American ally.

Then the chancellor travelled to Washington and peace returned. Ever since, trans-Atlantic policy-makers and intelligence agencies have been yearning to return to normalcy, to a world in which the division of labor is clear: the NSA as omnipotent global intelligence service, and the Germans as their willing helpers. In the pre-Edward Snowden era, this division of labor was wrong. Now, it is downright negligent.

SPIEGEL has now released dozens of crucial documents that show how the NSA operates in Germany and how tightly it works together with the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency. The material in Snowden's cache shows that Germany is the NSA's most important location in continental Europe.

In the German capital, antennae installed on the roof of the US Embassy can listen in on Berlin's government district. In the NSA's European headquarters in Griesheim, located in the central German state of Hesse, the Americans sift through emails and phone conversations from Europe and Africa in order to extract usable information. US interests are, after all, diverse and broad -- ranging from the Islamists in Yemen to the German chancellor in Berlin.