The new German spying scandal is a big deal

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German media organizations, such as Der Spiegel and Die Zeit, are reporting on a spying scandal that threatens to create new controversy over the National Security Agency.

What’s the story? Previous fallout from the Edward Snowden revelations led to the German Bundestag (federal Parliament) setting up a Committee of Inquiry into the affair, and in particular into the relationship between the German intelligence service (the BND) and the NSA. This committee had a rocky start, with failed efforts to summon Snowden, a former NSA contractor, as a witness and complaints that it did not have access to much of the information that it needed. Now, however, it looks as though it has uncovered paydirt regarding the relationship between the BND and the NSA. The NSA, in order to target its surveillance, needs ‘selectors’ -- identifying information such as phone numbers, e-mail addresses, IP addresses or the like that are linked to a specific individual or business. Under the cooperation agreement between the NSA and BND, the NSA can ask for selectors -- but only so long as the predictors are directly linked, for instance, to anti-terrorism intelligence. It appears that the NSA made large numbers of requests that ignored the limits set out in the agreement, and it appears probable that at least on some occasions, the BND gave the NSA the information it was looking for. This sounds pretty technical -- why are people getting upset? Because it suggests that the German intelligence service cooperated with US efforts to spy on European -- and German -- companies and citizens. This scandal will be moderately embarrassing for the United States, which is currently trying to build international norms against economic espionage. It isn’t at all clear that the United States was committing economic espionage by its own definition (it argues that it can legitimately conduct espionage against economic targets such as businesses as long as it is for strategic purposes, and the information is not passed along to US firms). However, it certainly greatly complicates the story that the United States is trying to tell. Where it will really hurt, though, is US-German relations.


The new German spying scandal is a big deal