The agreement for the US to provide raw intelligence data to Israel was reached in principle in March 2009, the document shows. Photograph: James Emery

The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens, a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.

Details of the intelligence-sharing agreement are laid out in a memorandum of understanding between the NSA and its Israeli counterpart that shows the US government handed over intercepted communications likely to contain phone calls and emails of American citizens. The agreement places no legally binding limits on the use of the data by the Israelis.

The disclosure that the NSA agreed to provide raw intelligence data to a foreign country contrasts with assurances from the Obama administration that there are rigorous safeguards to protect the privacy of US citizens caught in the dragnet. The intelligence community calls this process “minimization”, but the memorandum makes clear that the information shared with the Israelis would be in its pre-minimized state.

The deal was reached in principle in March 2009, according to the undated memorandum, which lays out the ground rules for the intelligence sharing.

The five-page memorandum, termed an agreement between the US and Israeli intelligence agencies “pertaining to the protection of US persons”, repeatedly stresses the constitutional rights of Americans to privacy and the need for Israeli intelligence staff to respect these rights.

But this is undermined by the disclosure that Israel is allowed to receive “raw Sigint” – signal intelligence. The memorandum says: “Raw Sigint includes, but is not limited to, unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice and Digital Network Intelligence metadata and content.”

According to the agreement, the intelligence being shared would not be filtered in advance by NSA analysts to remove US communications. “NSA routinely sends ISNU [the Israeli Sigint National Unit] minimized and unminimized raw collection”, it says.

Although the memorandum is explicit in saying the material had to be handled in accordance with US law, and that the Israelis agreed not to deliberately target Americans identified in the data, these rules are not backed up by legal obligations.

“This agreement is not intended to create any legally enforceable rights and shall not be construed to be either an international agreement or a legally binding instrument according to international law,” the document says.

In a statement to the Guardian, an NSA spokesperson did not deny that personal data about Americans was included in raw intelligence data shared with the Israelis. But the agency insisted that the shared intelligence complied with all rules governing privacy.

“Any US person information that is acquired as a result of NSA’s surveillance activities is handled under procedures that are designed to protect privacy rights,” the spokesperson said.

The NSA declined to answer specific questions about the agreement, including whether permission had been sought from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (Fisa) court for handing over such material.

The memorandum of understanding, which the Guardian is publishing in full, allows Israel to retain “any files containing the identities of US persons” for up to a year. The agreement requests only that the Israelis should consult the NSA’s special liaison adviser when such data is found.

Notably, a much stricter rule was set for US government communications found in the raw intelligence. The Israelis were required to “destroy upon recognition” any communication “that is either to or from an official of the US government”. Such communications included those of “officials of the executive branch (including the White House, cabinet departments, and independent agencies), the US House of Representatives and Senate (member and staff) and the US federal court system (including, but not limited to, the supreme court)”.

It is not clear whether any communications involving members of US Congress or the federal courts have been included in the raw data provided by the NSA, nor is it clear how or why the NSA would be in possession of such communications. In 2009, however, the New York Times reported on “the agency’s attempt to wiretap a member of Congress, without court approval, on an overseas trip”.

The NSA is required by law to target only non-US persons without an individual warrant, but it can collect the content and metadata of Americans’ emails and calls without a warrant when such communication is with a foreign target. US persons are defined in surveillance legislation as US citizens, permanent residents and anyone located on US soil at the time of the interception, unless it has been positively established that they are not a citizen or permanent resident.

Moreover, with much of the world’s internet traffic passing through US networks, large numbers of purely domestic communications also get scooped up incidentally by the agency’s surveillance programs.

The document mentions only one check carried out by the NSA on the raw intelligence, saying the agency will “regularly review a sample of files transferred to ISNU to validate the absence of US persons’ identities”. It also requests that the Israelis limit access only to personnel with a “strict need to know”.

Israeli intelligence is allowed “to disseminate foreign intelligence information concerning US persons derived from raw Sigint by NSA” on condition that it does so “in a manner that does not identify the US person”. The agreement also allows Israel to release US person identities to “outside parties, including all INSU customers” with the NSA’s written permission.

Although Israel is one of America’s closest allies, it is not one of the inner core of countries involved in surveillance sharing with the US – Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. This group is collectively known as Five Eyes.

The relationship between the US and Israel has been strained at times, both diplomatically and in terms of intelligence. In the top-secret 2013 intelligence community budget request, details of which were disclosed by the Washington Post, Israel is identified alongside Iran and China as a target for US cyberattacks.

While NSA documents tout the mutually beneficial relationship of Sigint sharing, another report, marked top secret and dated September 2007, states that the relationship, while central to US strategy, has become overwhelmingly one-sided in favor of Israel.

“Balancing the Sigint exchange equally between US and Israeli needs has been a constant challenge,” states the report, titled ‘History of the US – Israel Sigint Relationship, Post-1992′. “In the last decade, it arguably tilted heavily in favor of Israeli security concerns. 9/11 came, and went, with NSA’s only true Third Party [counter-terrorism] relationship being driven almost totally by the needs of the partner.”

In another top-secret document seen by the Guardian, dated 2008, a senior NSA official points out that Israel aggressively spies on the US. “On the one hand, the Israelis are extraordinarily good Sigint partners for us, but on the other, they target us to learn our positions on Middle East problems,” the official says. “A NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] ranked them as the third most aggressive intelligence service against the US.”

Later in the document, the official is quoted as saying: “One of NSA’s biggest threats is actually from friendly intelligence services, like Israel. There are parameters on what NSA shares with them, but the exchange is so robust, we sometimes share more than we intended.”

The memorandum of understanding also contains hints that there had been tensions in the intelligence-sharing relationship with Israel. At a meeting in March 2009 between the two agencies, according to the document, it was agreed that the sharing of raw data required a new framework and further training for Israeli personnel to protect US person information.

It is not clear whether or not this was because there had been problems up to that point in the handling of intelligence that was found to contain Americans’ data.

However, an earlier US document obtained by Snowden, which discusses co-operating on a military intelligence program, bluntly lists under the cons: “Trust issues which revolve around previous ISR [Israel] operations.”

The Guardian asked the Obama administration how many times US data had been found in the raw intelligence, either by the Israelis or when the NSA reviewed a sample of the files, but officials declined to provide this information. Nor would they disclose how many other countries the NSA shared raw data with, or whether the Fisa court, which is meant to oversee NSA surveillance programs and the procedures to handle US information, had signed off the agreement with Israel.

In its statement, the NSA said: “We are not going to comment on any specific information sharing arrangements, or the authority under which any such information is collected. The fact that intelligence services work together under specific and regulated conditions mutually strengthens the security of both nations.

“NSA cannot, however, use these relationships to circumvent US legal restrictions. Whenever we share intelligence information, we comply with all applicable rules, including the rules to protect US person information.”

Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill
The Guardian, Wednesday 11 September 2013 15.40 BST

Find this story at 11 September 2013
Read the NSA and Israel’s ‘memorandum of understanding’

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

The New York Times has revealed the Drug Enforcement Administration has an even more extensive collection of U.S. phone records than the National Security Agency. Under a secretive DEA program called the Hemisphere Project, the agency has access to records of every phone call transmitted via AT&T’s infrastructure dating back to 1987. That period covers an even longer stretch of time than the NSA’s collection of phone records, which started under President George W. Bush. Each day, some four billion call records are swept into the database, which is stored by AT&T. The U.S. government then pays for AT&T employees to station themselves inside DEA units, where they can quickly hand over records after agents obtain an administrative subpoena. The DEA says the collection allows it to catch drug dealers who frequently switch phones, but civil liberties advocates say it raises major privacy concerns. We speak with Scott Shane, national security reporter for The New York Times and co-author of the report, “Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing NSA’s.”
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: In a moment we’ll be talking about the death of David Frost with the director Ron Howard, but first we turn to news that one government agency has an even more extensive collection of U.S. phone records than the National Security Administration, the NSA. That agency is the Drug Enforcement Administration. In a front-page article, The New York Times has revealed a secretive operation inside the DEA called the Hemisphere Project. Under this program, the DEA has access to records of every phone call over AT&T’s network dating back to 1987. That period covers a longer stretch of time than the NSA’s collection of phone records, which began under President George W. Bush. Some four billion call records are gathered to the DEA’s database every day. It’s unclear if other major phone companies are involved.

Unlike with the NSA, the DEA’s phone records are actually stored by AT&T. The U.S. government then pays for AT&T employees to station themselves inside DEA units, where they can quickly hand over data after agents obtain an administrative subpoena. The U.S. government says the program allows DEA agents to keep up with those in the drug trade who often switch phones. In a statement, Justice Department spokesperson Brian Fallon said that “subpoenaing drug dealers’ phone records is a bread-and-butter tactic in the course of criminal investigations” and that Hemisphere “simply streamlines the process.”

The disclosure of the DEA’s Hemisphere program follows another major revelation involving the DEA and government surveillance. It was revealed last month a secretive DEA unit has used information taken from NSA wiretaps for cases unrelated to terrorism. The DEA has also provided classified intelligence obtained by the NSA and other sources to the Internal Revenue Service to help in their investigations of Americans.

Well, for more, we’re joined by Scott Shane, national security reporter for The New York Times. His front-page article, co-written with Colin Moynihan, appeared in Monday’s New York Times, “Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s.”

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Scott Shane. Explain exactly how it’s done and how you found out about this.

SCOTT SHANE: Well, as you mentioned, I wrote this article with Colin Moynihan, a colleague at The New York Times, and he received from an activist in Washington state, named Drew Hendricks, a 27-slide PowerPoint, which was prepared by AT&T and government agents, apparently DEA or possibly other government agencies, and essentially they’re training slides to introduce folks who are going to be working on the Hemisphere Project, how it works and what it can do. And Drew Hendricks, the activist in Washington, got these slides as part of a series of public information requests. He’s sort of a peace activist out there, and he had been helping some folks with a lawsuit and just, you know, fired off a bunch of public information requests to police agencies in Washington state and other places on the West Coast. This set of slides came back with one of those requests.

Drew Hendricks believes it may have been sent actually by accident, included by accident. And so—but, in fact, it’s unclassified. It’s marked “Law enforcement sensitive,” but it’s unclassified, and it actually states that the Hemisphere Project is unclassified. What’s kind of remarkable to us is that this has been going on for at least six years under the name Hemisphere Project, and it’s unclassified, but no one has ever learned about it. I couldn’t find a single reference to it in the Nexis database or on the web. And so, they’ve kept it very well hidden, and indeed some of the slides say, if you get information from Hemisphere, never reveal the source of the information. So, the government has kept this very, very well hidden, along with AT&T.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain what exactly it is, what AT&T is keeping records of and how the government uses this information.

SCOTT SHANE: AT&T operates what are called switches, through which telephone calls travel all around the country. And what AT&T does in this program is it collects all the—what are called the CDRs, the call data records, the so-called metadata from the calls that we’ve heard about in the NSA context. This is the phone number—phone numbers involved in a call, its time, its duration, and in this case it’s also the location. Some are cellphone calls; some are land line calls. Anything that travels through an AT&T switch, even if it’s not made by an AT&T customer—for example, if you’re using your T-Mobile cellphone but your call travels through an AT&T switch somewhere in the country, it will be picked up by this project and dumped into this database. So AT&T collects the information on all these calls, basically who called who when all over the country. And as you mentioned, there is a slide that says four billion—with a B—call data records are added to the database every day. I’m told by some technical experts that it’s possible one call can create more than one call data record. Apparently, if a cellphone, for example, in a moving car switches from one tower to another, that could be another record, so—because those numbers sound pretty high, 12—you know, maybe 12 or so calls per American per day.

But anyway, all that call data goes into this giant database, and then when a drug agent at one of three centers around the country—in Los Angeles, Houston and Atlanta—finds a number of interest, they can ask the AT&T person sitting next to them, “Check this out.” The AT&T person accesses the database, the Hemisphere database, and they can come back with a record of, you know, “Here’s the other numbers called by this number, the number you’re interested in,” and when and where, in many cases, and then they can follow up.

I should say that in order to access the database, the government says that the agent asking AT&T to make the search has to produce at least what’s called an administrative subpoena, which is essentially a form, a DEA form, not approved by a court or by a judge, but simply a DEA form saying, you know, here’s why we’re interested in this number. So there’s no judicial oversight, but it is—these administrative subpoenas are used routinely in a criminal investigation. So the government’s side of the story is that this is no different from kind of routine criminal investigation that happens every day.

AMY GOODMAN: Scott Shane, very quickly, my final question is about the issue of privacy. What does this raise for Americans?

SCOTT SHANE: Well, I think what it shows is that, apart from the program we’ve learned about with the NSA in recent months, there are many other programs that the government has, many of them related to law enforcement as well as to intelligence gathering, and also that the government works extremely closely with some telecommunications and Internet companies, sometimes using court orders but often using voluntary arrangements like this one, and often paying the companies to participate, so that the universe of data that’s gathered and has implications for American privacy goes way beyond any one agency or even beyond the government itself into the corporate sector.

AMY GOODMAN: Scott Shane, I want to thank you for being with us, national security reporter for The New York Times. We’ll link to your front-page article yesterday, “Drug Agents Use Vast Phone Trove, Eclipsing N.S.A.’s.”

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Find this story at 3 September 2013

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

For at least six years, US anti-drug agents have used subpoenas to routinely gain access to an enormous AT&T database. It’s an intrusion greater in scale and longevity than the NSA’s collection of phone calls, revealed by Edward Snowden’s leaks.

As part of the secret Hemisphere Project the government has been paying AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country, the New York Times reports.

The US’s largest telecoms operator has been supplying phone data to the Drug Enforcement Administration since 1987.

The project covers every call that passes through an AT&T switch, including those made by clients of other operators, with some four billion call records added to the database on a daily basis.

And, unlike the much debated NSA data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the location of those, making the calls.

The New York Times found out about the surveillance program after it received slides, describing the Hemisphere Project, from peace activist, Drew Hendricks.

The activist said he was sent the PowerPoint presentation – which is unclassified, but marked “Law enforcement sensitive” – in response to a series of public information requests to West Coast police agencies.

The slides revealed that the program was launched back in 2007 and has been carried out in great secrecy since then.

“All requestors are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” one of the slides said.

The paper performed a search of the Nexis database, but found no reference to the program in news reports or Congressional hearings.

The US administration has acknowledged that Hemisphere is operational in three states, adding that the project employed routine investigative procedures used in criminal cases for decades and posed no novel privacy issues.

Justice Department spokesman, Brian Fallon, stressed that it’s crucial that the phone data is stored by AT&T, and not by the government like in the NSA case. It has requested phone numbers of interest mainly using what are called “administrative subpoenas,” those issued not by a grand jury or a judge, but by a federal agency, the DEA.

According to the spokesman, Hemisphere proved especially effective in finding criminals, who frequently discard their cellphones in order to avoid being tracked by polices.

“Subpoenaing drug dealers’ phone records is a bread-and-butter tactic in the course of criminal investigations,” he said in a statement.

The 27-slide PowerPoint presentation highlights several cases, in which Hemisphere solved big crimes, with not all of them being drug-related.

For example, this March it found the new phone number and location of a man, who impersonated a general at a San Diego Navy base and then ran over a Navy intelligence agent.

In 2011, Hemisphere tracked Seattle drug dealers, who were rotating prepaid phones, leading to the seizure of 136 kilos of cocaine and $2.2 million.

AT&T spokesman, Mark A. Siegel, declined to answer detailed questions on Hemisphere, only saying that AT&T “like all other companies, must respond to valid subpoenas issued by law enforcement.”

Representatives from Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile all declined to comment when asked by the New York Times whether their companies participated in Hemisphere or any other similar programs.

An undisclosed federal law enforcement official told the paper the Hemisphere Project was “singular” and that he knew of no comparable program involving other phone companies.

It’s not the first time AT&T has been involved in federal surveillance programs, the company operated a telecommunication interception facility for the NSA between 2003 and 2006.

Published time: September 02, 2013 23:41
Edited time: September 04, 2013 09:04

Find this story at 4 September 2013

© Autonomous Nonprofit Organization “TV-Novosti”, 2005–2013.

For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counternarcotics program have had routine access, using subpoenas, to an enormous AT&T database that contains the records of decades of Americans’ phone calls — parallel to but covering a far longer time than the National Security Agency’s hotly disputed collection of phone call logs.

The Hemisphere Project, a partnership between federal and local drug officials and AT&T that has not previously been reported, involves an extremely close association between the government and the telecommunications giant.

The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987.

The project comes to light at a time of vigorous public debate over the proper limits on government surveillance and on the relationship between government agencies and communications companies. It offers the most significant look to date at the use of such large-scale data for law enforcement, rather than for national security.

The scale and longevity of the data storage appears to be unmatched by other government programs, including the N.S.A.’s gathering of phone call logs under the Patriot Act. The N.S.A. stores the data for nearly all calls in the United States, including phone numbers and time and duration of calls, for five years.

Hemisphere covers every call that passes through an AT&T switch — not just those made by AT&T customers — and includes calls dating back 26 years, according to Hemisphere training slides bearing the logo of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Some four billion call records are added to the database every day, the slides say; technical specialists say a single call may generate more than one record. Unlike the N.S.A. data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the locations of callers.

The slides were given to The New York Times by Drew Hendricks, a peace activist in Port Hadlock, Wash. He said he had received the PowerPoint presentation, which is unclassified but marked “Law enforcement sensitive,” in response to a series of public information requests to West Coast police agencies.

The program was started in 2007, according to the slides, and has been carried out in great secrecy.

“All requestors are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” one slide says. A search of the Nexis database found no reference to the program in news reports or Congressional hearings.

The Obama administration acknowledged the extraordinary scale of the Hemisphere database and the unusual embedding of AT&T employees in government drug units in three states.

But they said the project, which has proved especially useful in finding criminals who discard cellphones frequently to thwart government tracking, employed routine investigative procedures used in criminal cases for decades and posed no novel privacy issues.

Crucially, they said, the phone data is stored by AT&T, and not by the government as in the N.S.A. program. It is queried for phone numbers of interest mainly using what are called “administrative subpoenas,” those issued not by a grand jury or a judge but by a federal agency, in this case the D.E.A.

Brian Fallon, a Justice Department spokesman, said in a statement that “subpoenaing drug dealers’ phone records is a bread-and-butter tactic in the course of criminal investigations.”

Mr. Fallon said that “the records are maintained at all times by the phone company, not the government,” and that Hemisphere “simply streamlines the process of serving the subpoena to the phone company so law enforcement can quickly keep up with drug dealers when they switch phone numbers to try to avoid detection.”

He said that the program was paid for by the D.E.A. and the White House drug policy office but that the cost was not immediately available.

Officials said four AT&T employees are now working in what is called the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, which brings together D.E.A. and local investigators — two in the program’s Atlanta office and one each in Houston and Los Angeles.

Daniel C. Richman, a law professor at Columbia, said he sympathized with the government’s argument that it needs such voluminous data to catch criminals in the era of disposable cellphones.

“Is this a massive change in the way the government operates? No,” said Mr. Richman, who worked as a federal drug prosecutor in Manhattan in the early 1990s. “Actually you could say that it’s a desperate effort by the government to catch up.”

But Mr. Richman said the program at least touched on an unresolved Fourth Amendment question: whether mere government possession of huge amounts of private data, rather than its actual use, may trespass on the amendment’s requirement that searches be “reasonable.” Even though the data resides with AT&T, the deep interest and involvement of the government in its storage may raise constitutional issues, he said.

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the 27-slide PowerPoint presentation, evidently updated this year to train AT&T employees for the program, “certainly raises profound privacy concerns.”

“I’d speculate that one reason for the secrecy of the program is that it would be very hard to justify it to the public or the courts,” he said.

Mr. Jaffer said that while the database remained in AT&T’s possession, “the integration of government agents into the process means there are serious Fourth Amendment concerns.”

Mr. Hendricks filed the public records requests while assisting other activists who have filed a federal lawsuit saying that a civilian intelligence analyst at an Army base near Tacoma infiltrated and spied on antiwar groups. (Federal officials confirmed that the slides are authentic.)

Mark A. Siegel, a spokesman for AT&T, declined to answer more than a dozen detailed questions, including ones about what percentage of phone calls made in the United States were covered by Hemisphere, the size of the Hemisphere database, whether the AT&T employees working on Hemisphere had security clearances and whether the company has conducted any legal review of the program

“While we cannot comment on any particular matter, we, like all other companies, must respond to valid subpoenas issued by law enforcement,” Mr. Siegel wrote in an e-mail.

Representatives from Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile all declined to comment on Sunday in response to questions about whether their companies were aware of Hemisphere or participated in that program or similar ones. A federal law enforcement official said that the Hemisphere Project was “singular” and that he knew of no comparable program involving other phone companies.

The PowerPoint slides outline several “success stories” highlighting the program’s achievements and showing that it is used in investigating a range of crimes, not just drug violations. The slides emphasize the program’s value in tracing suspects who use replacement phones, sometimes called “burner” phones, who switch phone numbers or who are otherwise difficult to locate or identify.

In March 2013, for instance, Hemisphere found the new phone number and location of a man who impersonated a general at a San Diego Navy base and then ran over a Navy intelligence agent. A month earlier the program helped catch a South Carolina woman who had made a series of bomb threats.

And in Seattle in 2011, the document says, Hemisphere tracked drug dealers who were rotating prepaid phones, leading to the seizure of 136 kilos of cocaine and $2.2 million.

September 1, 2013
By SCOTT SHANE and COLIN MOYNIHAN

Find this story at 1 September 2013

© 2013 The New York Times Company

So the paranoid hippie pot dealer you knew in college was right all along: The feds really were after him. In the latest post-Snowden bombshell about the extent and consequences of government spying, we learned from Reuters reporters this week that a secret branch of the DEA called the Special Operations Division – so secret that nearly everything about it is classified, including the size of its budget and the location of its office — has been using the immense pools of data collected by the NSA, CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies to go after American citizens for ordinary drug crimes. Law enforcement agencies, meanwhile, have been coached to conceal the existence of the program and the source of the information by creating what’s called a “parallel construction,” a fake or misleading trail of evidence. So no one in the court system – not the defendant or the defense attorney, not even the prosecutor or the judge – can ever trace the case back to its true origins.

On one hand, we all knew more revelations were coming, and the idea that the government would go after drug suspects with the same dubious extrajudicial methods used to pursue terrorism suspects is a classic and not terribly surprising example of mission creep. Both groups have been held up as bogeymen for years, in order to scare the public into accepting ever nastier and more repressive laws. This gives government officials another chance to talk to us in their stern grown-up voices about how this isn’t civics class, and sometimes they have to bend the rules to catch Really Bad People.

On the other hand, this is a genuinely sinister turn of events with a whiff of science-fiction nightmare, one that has sounded loud alarm bells for many people in the mainstream legal world. Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law professor who spent 18 years as a federal judge and cannot be accused of being a radical, told Reuters she finds the DEA story more troubling than anything in Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks. It’s the first clear evidence that the “special rules” and disregard for constitutional law that have characterized the hunt for so-called terrorists have crept into the domestic criminal justice system on a significant scale. “It sounds like they are phonying up investigations,” she said. Maybe this is how a police state comes to America: Not with a bang, but with a parallel construction.

By Andrew O’Hehir
Saturday, Aug 10, 2013 06:30 PM +0200

Find this story at 10 August 2013

Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Details of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration program that feeds tips to federal agents and then instructs them to alter the investigative trail were published in a manual used by agents of the Internal Revenue Service for two years.

The practice of recreating the investigative trail, highly criticized by former prosecutors and defense lawyers after Reuters reported it this week, is now under review by the Justice Department. Two high-profile Republicans have also raised questions about the procedure.

A 350-word entry in the Internal Revenue Manual instructed agents of the U.S. tax agency to omit any reference to tips supplied by the DEA’s Special Operations Division, especially from affidavits, court proceedings or investigative files. The entry was published and posted online in 2005 and 2006, and was removed in early 2007. The IRS is among two dozen arms of the government working with the Special Operations Division, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.

An IRS spokesman had no comment on the entry or on why it was removed from the manual. Reuters recovered the previous editions from the archives of the Westlaw legal database, which is owned by Thomson Reuters Corp, the parent of this news agency.

As Reuters reported Monday, the Special Operations Division of the DEA funnels information from overseas NSA intercepts, domestic wiretaps, informants and a large DEA database of telephone records to authorities nationwide to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. The DEA phone database is distinct from a NSA database disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Monday’s Reuters report cited internal government documents that show that law enforcement agents have been trained to conceal how such investigations truly begin – to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up the original source of the information.

DEA officials said the practice is legal and has been in near-daily use since the 1990s. They have said that its purpose is to protect sources and methods, not to withhold evidence.

NEW DETAIL

Defense attorneys and some former judges and prosecutors say that systematically hiding potential evidence from defendants violates the U.S. Constitution. According to documents and interviews, agents use a procedure they call “parallel construction” to recreate the investigative trail, stating in affidavits or in court, for example, that an investigation began with a traffic infraction rather than an SOD tip.

The IRS document offers further detail on the parallel construction program.

“Special Operations Division has the ability to collect, collate, analyze, evaluate, and disseminate information and intelligence derived from worldwide multi-agency sources, including classified projects,” the IRS document says. “SOD converts extremely sensitive information into usable leads and tips which are then passed to the field offices for real-time enforcement activity against major international drug trafficking organizations.”

The 2005 IRS document focuses on SOD tips that are classified and notes that the Justice Department “closely guards the information provided by SOD with strict oversight.” While the IRS document says that SOD information may only be used for drug investigations, DEA officials said the SOD role has recently expanded to organized crime and money laundering.

According to the document, IRS agents are directed to use the tips to find new, “independent” evidence: “Usable information regarding these leads must be developed from such independent sources as investigative files, subscriber and toll requests, physical surveillance, wire intercepts, and confidential source information. Information obtained from SOD in response to a search or query request cannot be used directly in any investigation (i.e. cannot be used in affidavits, court proceedings or maintained in investigative files).”

The IRS document makes no reference to SOD’s sources of information, which include a large DEA telephone and Internet database.

CONCERN IN CONGRESS

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Michigan, expressed concern with the concept of parallel construction as a method to hide the origin of an investigation. His comments came on the Mike Huckabee Show radio program.

“If they’re recreating a trail, that’s wrong and we’re going to have to do something about it,” said Rogers, a former FBI agent. “We’re working with the DEA and intelligence organizations to try to find out exactly what that story is.”

Spokespeople for the DEA and the Department of Justice declined to comment.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, a member of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, said he was troubled that DEA agents have been “trying to cover up a program that investigates Americans.”

“National security is one of government’s most important functions. So is protecting individual liberty,” Paul said. “If the Constitution still has any sway, a government that is constantly overreaching on security while completely neglecting liberty is in grave violation of our founding doctrine.”

Officials have stressed that the NSA and DEA telephone databases are distinct. The NSA database, disclosed by Snowden, includes data about every telephone call placed inside the United States. An NSA official said that database is not used for domestic criminal law enforcement.

The DEA database, called DICE, consists largely of phone log and Internet data gathered legally by the DEA through subpoenas, arrests and search warrants nationwide. DICE includes about 1 billion records, and they are kept for about a year and then purged, DEA officials said.

(Research by Hilary Shroyer of West, a Thomson Reuters business. Additional reporting by David Lawder. Edited by Michael Williams)

© Thomson Reuters 2011. All rights reserved. Users may download and print extracts of content from this website for their own personal and non-commercial use only. Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters and its logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Thomson Reuters group of companies around the world.

Thomson Reuters journalists are subject to an Editorial Handbook which requires fair presentation and disclosure of relevant interests.

Wed, Aug 7 2013
By John Shiffman and David Ingram

Find this story at 7 August 2013

© Thomson Reuters

UPDATE: Add the IRS to the list of federal agencies obtaining information from NSA surveillance. Reuters reports that the IRS got intelligence tips from DEA’s secret unit (SOD) and were also told to cover up the source of that information by coming up with their own independent leads to recreate the information obtained from SOD. So that makes two levels of deception: SOD hiding the fact it got intelligence from the NSA and the IRS hiding the fact it got information from SOD. Even worse, there’s a suggestion that the Justice Department (DOJ) “closely guards the information provided by SOD with strict oversight,” shedding doubt into the effectiveness of DOJ earlier announced efforts to investigate the program.

A startling new Reuters story shows one of the biggest dangers of the surveillance state: the unquenchable thirst for access to the NSA’s trove of information by other law enforcement agencies.

As the NSA scoops up phone records and other forms of electronic evidence while investigating national security and terrorism leads, they turn over “tips” to a division of the Drug Enforcement Agency (“DEA”) known as the Special Operations Division (“SOD”). FISA surveillance was originally supposed to be used only in certain specific, authorized national security investigations, but information sharing rules implemented after 9/11 allows the NSA to hand over information to traditional domestic law-enforcement agencies, without any connection to terrorism or national security investigations.

But instead of being truthful with criminal defendants, judges, and even prosecutors about where the information came from, DEA agents are reportedly obscuring the source of these tips. For example, a law enforcement agent could receive a tip from SOD—which SOD, in turn, got from the NSA—to look for a specific car at a certain place. But instead of relying solely on that tip, the agent would be instructed to find his or her own reason to stop and search the car. Agents are directed to keep SOD under wraps and not mention it in “investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony,” according to Reuters.

“Parallel construction” is really intelligence laundering

The government calls the practice “parallel construction,” but deciphering their double speak, the practice should really be known as “intelligence laundering.” This deception and dishonesty raises a host of serious legal problems.

First, the SOD’s insulation from even judges and prosecutors stops federal courts from assessing the constitutionality of the government’s surveillance practices. Last year, Solicitor General Donald Verilli told the Supreme Court that a group of lawyers, journalists and human rights advocates who regularly communicate with targets of NSA wiretapping under the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) had no standing to challenge the constitutionality of that surveillance. But Verrilli said that if the government wanted to use FAA evidence in a criminal prosecution, the source of the information would have to be disclosed. When the Supreme Court eventually ruled in the government’s favor, finding the plaintiffs had no standing, it justified its holding by noting the government’s concession that it would inform litigants when FAA evidence was being used against them.

Although the government has been initially slow to follow up on Verrilli’s promises, it has begrudgingly acknowledged its obligation to disclose when it uses the FAA to obtain evidence against criminal defendants. Just last week DOJ informed a federal court in Miami that it was required to disclose when FAA evidence was used to build a terrorism case against a criminal defendant.

Terrorism cases make up a very small portion of the total number of criminal cases brought by the federal government, counting for just 0.4 percent of all criminal cases brought by all U.S. Attorney offices across the country in 2012. Drug cases, on the other hand, made up 20 percent of all federal criminal cases filed in 2012, the second most prosecuted type of crime after immigration cases. If the government acknowledges it has to disclose when FAA evidence has been used to make a drug case—even if it’s a tip leading to a pretextual traffic stop—the number of challenges to FAA evidence will increase dramatically.

SOD bypasses the Constitution

Even beyond the larger systemic problem of insulating NSA surveillance from judicial review, criminal defendants whose arrest or case is built upon FISA evidence are now deprived of their right to examine and challenge the evidence used against them.

Taken together, the Fifth and Sixth Amendments guarantee a criminal defendant a meaningful opportunity to present a defense and challenge the government’s case. But this intelligence laundering deprives defendants of these important constitutional protections. It makes it harder for prosecutors to comply with their ethical obligation under Brady v. Maryland to disclose any exculpatory or favorable evidence to the defense—an obligation that extends to disclosing evidence bearing on the reliability of a government witness. Hiding the source of information used by the government to initiate an investigation or make an arrest means defendants are deprived of the opportunity to challenge the accuracy or veracity of the government’s investigation, let alone seek out favorable evidence in the government’s possession.

Courts must have all the facts

The third major legal problem is that the practice suggests DEA agents are misleading the courts. Wiretaps, search warrants, and other forms of surveillance authorizations require law enforcement to go to a judge and lay out the facts that support the request. The court’s function is to scrutinize the facts to determine the appropriate legal standard has been met based on truthful, reliable evidence. So, for example, if the government is using evidence gathered from an informant to support its request for a search warrant, it has to establish to the court that the informant is reliable and trustworthy so that the court can be convinced there is probable cause to support the search. But when law enforcement omits integral facts—like the source of a tip used to make an arrest—the court is deprived of the opportunity to fulfill its traditional role and searches are signed off without the full knowledge of the court.

Ultimately, if you build it, they will come. There’s no doubt that once word got out about the breadth of data the NSA was collecting and storing, other law enforcement agencies would want to get their hands in the digital cookie jar. In fact, the New York Times reported on Sunday that other agencies have tried to get information from the NSA to “curb drug trafficking, cyberattacks, money laundering, counterfeiting and even copyright infringement.”

Teaming up to play fast and loose with criminal defendants and the court, the DEA and NSA have made a mockery of the rule of law and the legal frameworks intended to curb abuses.

August 6, 2013 | By Hanni Fakhoury

Find this story at 6 August 2013

© www.eff.org

The U.S. Department of Justice has begun reviewing a controversial unit inside the Drug Enforcement Administration that uses secret domestic surveillance tactics — including intelligence gathered by the National Security Agency — to target Americans for drug offenses. According to a series of articles published by Reuters, agents are instructed to recreate the investigative trail in order to conceal the origins of the evidence, not only from defense lawyers, but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges. “We are talking about ordinary crime: drug dealing, organized crime, money laundering. We are not talking about national security crimes,” says Reuters reporter John Shiffman. Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, says this is just the latest scandal at the DEA. “I hope it is a sort of wake-up call for people in Congress to say now is the time, finally, after 40 years, to say this agency really needs a close examination.”
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: The Justice Department has begun reviewing a controversial unit inside the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration that uses secret domestic surveillance tactics, including intelligence gathered by the National Security Agency, to target Americans for drug offenses. According to a series of articles published by the Reuters news agency, agents are instructed to recreate the investigative trail in order to conceal the origins of the evidence—not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges. DEA training documents instruct agents to even make up alternative versions of how such investigations truly begin, a process known as “parallel construction.”

On Monday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was asked about the Reuters investigation.

PRESS SECRETARY JAY CARNEY: It’s my understanding, our understanding, that the Department of Justice is looking at some of the issues raised in the story. But for more, I would refer you to the Department of Justice.

AMY GOODMAN: The unit of the DEA that distributes the secret intelligence to agents is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. The unit was first created two decades ago, but it’s coming under increased scrutiny following the recent revelations about the NSA maintaining a database of all phone calls made in the United States. One former federal judge, Nancy Gertner, said the DEA program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the NSA has been collecting domestic phone records. She said, quote, “It is one thing to create special rules for national security. Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations.”

For more, we’re joined by the reporter who broke this story, John Shiffman, correspondent for Reuters, which published his exclusive story Monday, “U.S. Tells Agents to Cover Up Use of Wiretap Program.”

Welcome to Democracy Now!, John. Why don’t you start off by just laying it out and what exactly this cover-up is.

JOHN SHIFFMAN: Thanks very much for having me.

Well, my colleague Kristina Cooke and I spoke with about a dozen or two dozen agents and obtained some internal documents that showed that what federal agents, not just DEA agents but other agents who work with the DEA and do drug investigations—what they’re doing is, is they are starting—they are claiming that their investigations start, say, at step two. They are withholding step one from the investigations. And, I should say, it’s not just NSA intercepts. It’s informant information, information obtained from court-ordered wiretaps in one case, and using those for information in a second case. They also have a large database of phone records. Whenever the DEA subpoenas or does a search warrant and gets phone records for someone suspected of involvement in drugs or gang involvement, they put all those numbers into one giant database they call DICE, and they use that information to compare different cases. All of the collection is—seems perfectly legitimate, in terms of being court-ordered. What troubles some critics is the fact that they are hiding that information from drug defendants who face trial. The problem with that is that—is that these defendants won’t know about some potentially exculpatory information that may affect their case and their right to a fair trial.

AMY GOODMAN: So explain exactly how this information is being hidden from judges, prosecutors and sometimes defense attorneys, as well.

JOHN SHIFFMAN: Sure. Well, just to give an example, through any of these four different ways, including the NSA intercepts, the DEA’s Special Operations Division will send the information to a DEA agent in the field or a FBI agent or an ICE agent or state policeman, and they’ll give him the information. Then they’ll say, “Look, you know, we understand that there will be a truck going to a certain park in Texas at a certain time. It’s a red truck. It’ll be two people involved.” And the state trooper or the DEA will find you reason to pull the truck over, say for a broken tail light or for speeding, that sort of thing. And, lo and behold, inside the trunk they’ll find, you know, a kilo of cocaine. The people who have been arrested will never know that—why the police or the DEA pulled them over. They’ll think it’s just luck. And that’s important because if those people try to go to trial, there are pieces of information about how that evidence was obtained and what it shows and what other pieces of it show—might affect their trial.

AMY GOODMAN: On Monday, I spoke with Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald just after your story broke about how the DEA is using material gathered in part by the NSA in its surveillance of Americans. Glenn Greenwald has, of course, broken several major stories about the NSA’s domestic activity. This was his response.

GLENN GREENWALD: So this should be a huge scandal for the following reason. The essence of the Constitution is that the government cannot obtain evidence or information about you unless it has probable cause to believe that you’ve engaged in a crime and then goes to a court and gets a warrant. And only then is that evidence usable in a prosecution against you. What this secret agency is doing, according to Reuters, it is circumventing that process by gathering all kinds of information without any court supervision, without any oversight at all, using surveillance technologies and other forms of domestic spying. And then, when it gets this information that it believes it can be used in a criminal prosecution, it knows that that information can’t be used in a criminal prosecution because it’s been acquired outside of the legal and constitutional process, so they cover up how they really got it, and they pretend—they make it seem as though they really got it through legal and normal means, by then going back and retracing the investigation, once they already have it, and re-acquiring it so that it looks to defense counsel and even to judges and prosecutors like it really was done in the constitutionally permissible way. So they’re prosecuting people and putting people in prison for using evidence that they’ve acquired illegally, which they’re then covering up and lying about and deceiving courts into believing was actually acquired constitutionally. It’s a full-frontal assault on the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments and on the integrity of the judicial process, because they’re deceiving everyone involved in criminal prosecutions about how this information has been obtained.

AMY GOODMAN: John Shiffman, if you could elaborate on that and also talk about the differences between what the DEA is doing and what Glenn Greenwald exposed around the NSA?

JOHN SHIFFMAN: Sure. These are two very—I think they’re different topics, for one main reason, which is that the NSA revelations by Mr. Greenwald and Mr. Snowden are related to terrorism—or at least that’s what we’re told by the government. And the DEA, what the DEA is doing is only—very rarely do they get involved in terrorism. I mean, they do some narcoterrorism, but inside the United States we’re talking about ordinary crime. We’re talking about drug dealing, organized crime, money laundering. We’re not talking about national security crimes.

The one thing I would say is that the defense analysts I’ve spoken with, meaning defense attorney analysts, they emphasize less the probable cause aspect of it than they find—they don’t find that as troubling. What they find really troubling is the pretrial discovery aspects of this and a prosecutor’s, you know, obligation to turn over any exculpatory evidence. What they really have a problem with is that this program systematically excludes or appears to systematically exclude all evidence obtained, you know, that’s hidden from view, so the defense doesn’t know to request it. They find that a lot more troubling than the probable cause aspects of it. The Supreme Court has given a pretty wide pro-police interpretation of when probable cause can be obtained, and there are a variety of exceptions. But it’s really the pretrial discovery part of it that seems to trouble a lot of the former judges and defense attorneys and prosecutors.

AMY GOODMAN: One of the two slides Reuters obtained that were used to train agents with the Drug Enforcement Agency instructs them in the use of parallel construction. According to the slide, this is, quote, “the use of normal investigative techniques to recreate the information provided by the [Special Operations Division],” such as subpoenaed domestic telephone calls. A second slide instructs agents that such evidence, quote, “cannot be revealed or discussed.” The slide is titled “Special Operations Division Rules.” Describe what you uncovered about those rules and this concept of parallel construction, which until now had not been publicly discussed in writing.

JOHN SHIFFMAN: Well, what really surprised me was talking to agents, current and former agents, who said, “Sure, we do that.” They—half of them said, “Yeah, you know, I could see how people might have a problem with that.” The other half said, “You know, look, this is a hard job that we do, and we’re going after criminals and drug dealers.” The people that got the most offended, I think, were the lawyers, the prosecutors and the—you know, and the judges and the former judges. One current prosecutor told me that he had a case where—in Florida, where a DEA agent came to him with a case and said that it began with an informant. So they were proceeding with the case, and the prosecutor asked the DEA agent more information. He said, you know, “I need to know more about your informant.” Turns out, ultimately, that he found out that there was no informant. It was an NSA wiretap. And what—overseas. And that really upset the prosecutor, because he said that it really offended his sense of fair play and honesty. And he said, “It’s just a bad way of starting an investigation, if you’re going to start with a lie.”

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring Ethan Nadelmann into this discussion, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. Ethan, why is—are the revelations by Reuters, John Shiffman’s investigation, so significant for your work?

ETHAN NADELMANN: Well, I think what it plays into, Amy, is that there’s been this remarkable lack of oversight of DEA by Congress, by other federal oversight agencies, for decades now. I mean, this year marks the 40th anniversary of the DEA, which Nixon created as a merger of police agencies, of drug enforcement agencies, back during the—one of the earlier drug wars. And what you see is an organization with a budget of over $2 billion. You see an organization getting involved in all sorts of shenanigans, hiring informants who land up to be tied up with murderers, you know, locking up some poor drug—you know, I don’t think even drug dealer, drug—low-level offender, and forgetting about him in a prison cell in this case of Daniel Chong, who was left in a prison cell for five days and forgotten. But beyond that, you have the agency serving as a propaganda agency, with no—with none of its statements being compared or held to any sort of scientific standards. You have an administrator who testifies before Congress and is almost a laughing stock when it comes to talking about drugs. So I think that this report by Reuters and by John Shiffman—I hope it’s a sort of wake-up call for people in Congress to say, “Now is the time, finally, after really 40 years, to say this agency really needs a close examination.”

AMY GOODMAN: Ethan, the Drug Enforcement Administration has agreed to pay $4.1 million in a settlement to a San Diego college student who nearly lost his life after being left handcuffed in his cell for more than four days without food or water. He ultimately drank his urine as he lay there, yelling out to agents right outside. His name was Daniel Chong. He was arrested for a 420 celebration of marijuana culture. He was never charged with any crime, and ultimately he was released.

ETHAN NADELMANN: You know, I think—I mean, that’s the case I was mentioning before. I mean, part of—you know, one can say, “Oh, this is just an accident, and accidents happen.” But, of course, accidents like that should never happen when you’re talking about a police agency, much less a federal police agency, being allowed to just sort of forget about somebody. And in the end, what happens? The taxpayers bail out the DEA for almost killing somebody for no cause whatsoever. So, you know, each year the DEA goes through its own little, you know, appropriations hearings in Congress. Each year it gets approved. And each year they just sort of get a ride. I think these things are piling up in a way that can no longer be sustained—should no longer be sustained.

AMY GOODMAN: So what has been, John Shiffman, the response to your investigation by the DEA, by the NSA, by the FBI and others?

JOHN SHIFFMAN: Well, they say it’s perfectly legal, what they do. And they say that—one DEA official told us that, you know, “This is a bedrock principle, parallel construction. We use it every day.” They’re pretty unabashed about it and said that—you know, that they’ve been doing this since the late ’90s, and there’s really nothing wrong with it. Yesterday the Justice Department said they are going to review it. But DEA has said, you know, there’s no problem with this.

AMY GOODMAN: How many people does this impact?

JOHN SHIFFMAN: Well, it would impact—I would think it would impact everyone, because, you know, it’s—we’re talking about a principle of law here. Not to get too legal, but, I mean, if you’re arrested, one of the fundamental rights that you have is to see the evidence against you. You know, when I was at the DEA and doing the interview, they cited the Ted Stevens case, which involved prosecutorial misconduct, which had—in which the senator’s charges were thrown out, because evidence was concealed. They said that after that there had been a review of all of the discovery procedures throughout the Justice Department, including at Special Operations Division. But they said that—and so I asked, I said, “Great, can I see a copy of the review?” And they said, “No.”

AMY GOODMAN: So, Ethan Nadelmann, it’s all legal.

ETHAN NADELMANN: Well, you know, that’s what happens when any agency gets to just do what it wants to do for years and years and years without anybody looking over its shoulder. You know, I mean, Amy, this agency has also done things in the areas of medical marijuana, scientific research, the scheduling process of drugs, whereby they will go through an entirely legal process, through their own administrative law process hearings. It will have an internal judge, an administrative law judge, come down with recommendations that are scientifically based, that are credible, and then they will have the politically appointed head of this agency overrule those recommendations for no purpose whatsoever.

Once again, Congress is not asking any questions. It’s their job to look at the—I mean, obviously, it’s the Obama administration’s job, as well, and Eric Holder’s job, as well, but it’s ultimately Congress, as well, that has to care about these things. And I’m hoping that it’s not just Democrats in the Senate, but also Republicans in the House, who will say, “This agency has gone too far.” Republicans have never been great friends of overextensions of federal police power, and I hope they can find some common cause with Democrats, saying, “Wait a second. Let’s call the DEA in here. Let’s look at what—you know, what John Shiffman has found with his investigative report. Let’s look at all these other patterns of abuse and misbehavior.”

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you both for being with us, John Shiffman, for your reporting at Reuters, and Ethan Nadelmann. Thanks so much for joining us. We’ll link to the story at democracynow.org.

JOHN SHIFFMAN: Thanks.

AMY GOODMAN: Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. When we come back, we’re going to Richmond, California, to speak with the mayor. Stay with us.

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Find this story at 6 August 2013

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Die Daten können Experten zufolge Hinweise für gezielte Tötungen liefern: Nach SPIEGEL-Informationen stammt ein beträchtlicher Teil der an die NSA übertragenen Daten aus der Funkzellenauswertung in Afghanistan. Der BND wiegelt ab.

Hamburg – Der Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) übermittelt nach SPIEGEL-Informationen afghanische Funkzellendaten an den US-Geheimdienst NSA. Spionageprogramme wie XKeyscore erstellen daraus Bewegungsprofile. Sie zeigen mit nur wenigen Minuten Verzögerung an, wo sich Handy-Nutzer aufhalten – und spielten womöglich eine wichtige Rolle bei der gezielten Tötung von Qaida-Kämpfern durch US-Drohnen.

Der BND erklärte, Mobilfunkdaten seien für eine zielgenaue Lokalisierung eines Menschen nicht geeignet. Experten gehen aber davon aus, dass Funkzellendaten Hinweise für gezielte Tötungen liefern können. Auch die “Süddeutsche Zeitung” hatte am Samstag einen Experten zitiert, wonach die Daten des BND zur Ortung nützlich seien.

Der Bürgerrechtler Burkhard Hirsch (FDP) hält den Datentransfer, der offenbar jenseits der parlamentarischen Kontrolle stattfindet, für sehr problematisch. “Wenn der BND in solchem Umfang für einen anderen Geheimdienst tätig wird, dann ist das ein politischer Vorgang, der unter allen Umständen im zuständigen Bundestagsgremium hätte behandelt werden müssen”, sagte Hirsch dem SPIEGEL.

BND-Präsident Gerhard Schindler sagte der “Bild am Sonntag”, die Kooperation mit der NSA diene “auch dem unmittelbaren Schutz unserer in Afghanistan eingesetzten Soldatinnen und Soldaten”. Die durch die Fernmeldeaufklärung gewonnenen Erkenntnisse trügen dazu bei, Anschlagsplanungen von Terroristen rechtzeitig erkennen zu können. Dies gehöre zu den “prioritären Aufgaben” eines Auslandsnachrichtendiensts.

Gegenüber dem SPIEGEL erklärte der BND, er habe seit Januar 2011 “maßgebliche Hilfe” bei der Verhinderung von vier Anschlägen auf deutsche Soldaten in Afghanistan geleistet. Bei weiteren 15 verhinderten Anschlägen habe die Datenüberwachung “zu diesen Erfolgen beigetragen”.

11. August 2013, 14:12 Uhr

Find this story at 11 August 2013

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2013

A media report on Wednesday alleged that a NATO document proves the German military knew about the NSA’s Prism surveillance program in 2011. But both Berlin and the country’s foreign intelligence agency deny the account, saying there was a NATO program with the same name in Afghanistan.

The German government has so far claimed that it knew nothing of the United States’ Prism spying program, revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden last month. But parts of a confidential NATO document published by daily Bild on Wednesday show that the German military, the Bundeswehr, may have already been aware of the National Security Agency’s operations in 2011, the paper alleged.

The document, reportedly sent on Sept. 1, 2011 to all regional commands by the joint NATO headquarters in Afghanistan, gives specific instructions for working together on a program called Prism, which the paper said was the same as that run by the NSA. According to Bild, the document was also sent to the regional command in northern Afghanistan, for which Germany was responsible at the time under General Major Markus Kneip.

Should the media report be confirmed, Berlin’s claims of ignorance will prove to have been false. But on Wednesday afternoon, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert denied the Bild story, saying that the document referred to a separate program that had been run by NATO troops, and not the US. The programs were “not identical,” he said.

The BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, also weighed in with a statement, saying that the program had not been confidential and was also not the same as the NSA’s Prism operation. “The program called Prism by the Bild report today is a NATO/ISAF program that is not identical to the NSA’s program,” it said. “The BND had no knowledge of the name, range or scope of the NSA program.”

A Separate Prism Program?

According to the document cited by Bild, as of Sept. 15 that year, regional commands were instructed to apply for monitoring telephone calls and e-mails, according to the document, in which Prism is named at least three times. “Existing COMINT (communications intelligence) nominations submitted outside of PRISM must be resubmitted into PRISM IOT,” it reads.

It also states that access to the Prism program is regulated by the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS), which is used by various US intelligence services to transmit classified information.

“Coalition RCs (regional commands) will utilize the US military or civilian personnel assigned to their collection management shop ISRLO (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Liaison Officer),” it goes on. In Bild’s assessment, “military or civilian personnel” stands for US intelligence service staff.

Keeping Track of Terrorists

The purpose of all this was to “submit the telephone numbers and email addresses of terrorists into the surveillance system,” the paper reports.

It also claims to have seen documents indicating that the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, provided such telephone numbers to NATO, where they were ultimately fed into the surveillance system as well.

The reason for the NATO order was that the NSA’s director had tasked the US military with coordinating surveillance in Afghanistan, Bild reported.

The German Defense Ministry told the paper that it had “no information and knowledge of such an order,” but would be looking into the matter.

In response to the report, Green party parliamentarian and defense spokesman Omid Nouripour told SPIEGEL ONLINE that Defense Minister Thomas de Maizière must clarify the situation. “These circumstances destroy the government’s line of defense” on the NSA scandal, he said. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right coalition can “no longer claim it didn’t know anything about Prism.”

As more details emerge about the scope of the NSA’s worldwide spying program and Germany’s alleged role in the surveillance, the scandal is becoming a central issue in the country’s campaign for the upcoming general election. Germans are particularly sensitive about data protection because of their history of state encroachment on civil liberties, first under the Nazis and then in communist East Germany. And if it turns out that Berlin knowingly tolerated and participated in the NSA activities, many would see it as a betrayal by the government.

07/17/2013 12:29 PM
Media Report

Find this story at 17 July 2013

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2013

German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich is backing off his earlier assertion that the Obama administration’s NSA monitoring of Internet accounts had prevented five terror attacks in Germany, raising questions about other claims concerning the value of the massive monitoring programs revealed by NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

Friedrich had made the assertion about the number of attacks that the NSA programs – which scoop up records from cellphone and Internet accounts – had helped to avert after a brief visit to the United States last week. But on Tuesday, he told a German parliamentary panel, “It is relatively difficult to count the number of terror attacks that didn’t occur.” And on Wednesday, he was publically referring to just two foiled attacks, at least one and possibly both of which appeared to have little to do with the NSA’s surveillance programs.

The questions about the programs’ value in thwarting attacks in Germany come as some members of the U.S. Congress have told Obama officials that the programs exceeded what Congress authorized when it passed laws that the administration is arguing allowed the collection of vast amounts of information on cellphone and Internet email accounts.

In Germany, the concern is that the NSA is capturing and storing as many as 500 million electronic communications each month, but Germans are getting little if anything back for what is seen as an immoral and illegal invasion of privacy.

Friedrich spent July 11-12 in the United States for meetings with U.S. officials on the NSA programs that German Chancellor Angela Merkel had requested. The point of the meetings was to gather information that would calm a building German angst over the spy scandal.

Instead of being reassured, however, opposition politicians and commentators now are talking about the arrogance of the U.S. application of “winner’s power” (a reference to the political authority the United States had here during the Cold War, when Germany was divided between east and west, and West Germany leaned heavily on America for support), and how traditionally strong relations between the two countries have been harmed by the scandal.

“German-American relations are at risk,” said Hans-Christian Stroebele, a Green Party member of the influential German intelligence oversight committee in the country’s legislature, the Bundestag, which is dominated by Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. “The longer it takes to uncover the facts after this long silence, the more problematic it becomes. No one even bothers to deny what’s been said. It could be that German or (European Union) courts will have to deal with this.”

Even as emotions build, NSA plans for expanding a listening station in Germany were revealed this week, raising more questions.

Stroebele spoke Thursday to McClatchy, addressing Friedrich’s official report, delivered behind closed doors to the Bundestag committee. He said Friedrich received little information from the United States in his quick trip to Washington.

“We’re lucky to have had Snowden,” Stroebele said. “Without him, this surveillance that is not permissible under international law would have continued for a long time. In Germany, there are prison terms for such spying.”

Perhaps most troubling was how quickly the government backed down on the claims that the surveillance helped foil terror plots. Gisela Piltz, a Liberal Party member of the Bundestag intelligence committee, said she could not give exact details of what took place in the secret hearing but noted: “There was a clear discrepancy between the previously reported number of foiled terror attacks and the number we talked about.”

And even those cases raised questions. One of them, commonly known as the Sauerland Cell Plot, involved an alleged conspiracy in 2007 to detonate a series of car bombs in crowded places. Piltz was involved in a Bundestag study of what took place. The goal of the would-be bombers was to surpass the death and injured toll from commuter train attacks in Madrid in 2004, which killed 191 and wounded another 1,800.

The conspirators, who allegedly included two Germans, had gathered nearly a ton of liquid explosives.

News reports at the time mentioned an unnamed U.S. intelligence official saying that cellphone calls by the two Germans had been intercepted. But those calls were said to have been made when the Germans were leaving a terror camp in Pakistan – an entirely different scenario from the current monitoring program, which captures data from everyday citizens by casting a worldwide net.

Piltz said even that participation by U.S. intelligence agencies remains unverified.

The other case, involving four men with al Qaida connections arrested in Dusseldorf while allegedly preparing to make a shrapnel bomb to detonate at an undecided location, also raised questions about NSA involvement. During the trial, prosecutors said they were alerted to the cell by an informant, after which they studied emails from the four. But such targeted surveillance is not the issue in the NSA programs, one of which, PRISM, reportedly taps into the computers of users of nine Internet companies, including Facebook, Google and Yahoo.

Defending NSA practices, Friedrich noted that security is a “super fundamental right.” As such it outranks fundamental rights such as privacy. German newspapers were scathing in their assessment, calling Friedrich the “idiot in charge.”

Piltz said that while terrorism is a real threat, the U.S. monitoring programs have done little to prevent it.

“Germans are not safer because of U.S. espionage,” Piltz said. “It is true Germany has been lucky not to have suffered a terror attack, but there has to be a balance. We cannot sacrifice freedom for security, and when in doubt I would always opt for freedom.”

McClatchy special correspondent Claudia Himmelreich in Berlin contributed to this report.

McClatchy Washington Bureau
Posted on Thu, Jul. 18, 2013
By Matthew Schofield | McClatchy Foreign Staff

last updated: July 18, 2013 05:30:07 PM
BERLIN — ]

Find this story at 18 July 2013

© McClatchy Washington Bureau

As Germany’s interior minister faced a special select committee, another surveillance program – also called Prism – has come to light. Unlike its more famous global namesake, this Prism is said to be used in Afghanistan.

German mass-circulation daily Bild first found reference to the Afghanistan Prism program in an order sent out to regional command posts from the NATO headquarters in Kabul.

The communiqué told ISAF staff to use this Prism database for any data gleaned from monitoring telecommunications or emails, starting on September 15, 2011.

The German government said it knew nothing about the database, run by the US but accessible to ISAF troops across Afghanistan – including those with Germany’s Bundeswehr – until Wednesday’s report.

“I can only tell you that this was a NATO/ISAF program, one that was not classified as secret – according to the BND,” Chancellor Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert said. Seibert was referring to a press release from Germany’s equivalent to Washington’s National Security Agency (NSA), the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). The BND also said this Prism was “not identical” to the now renowned program revealed by NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden in May.
DW.DE
Itching to ask: What does Merkel know about NSA surveillance?

A parliamentary oversight committee in Berlin would like to know how much the German government really knows about NSA spying activities in Germany. Their leverage, however, is limited. (17.07.2013)

Another ministerial spokesman, Stefan Paris with the defense ministry, said it was quite normal for information like this not to filter back to Berlin unless there was a specific need.

Friedrich faces closed-door grilling

Elsewhere in Berlin, Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich completed two days in front of the special committee for internal affairs on Wednesday, facing further questions after his impromptu visit to Washington at the weekend.

Opposition politicians, who see increasing mileage in the alleged NSA espionage activities, said after the session that Friedrich’s appearance shed little light on proceedings.

“Everywhere people seem to accept the way the US side is acting with a shrug of the shoulders, while there’s no clarity anywhere,” Social Democrat parliamentarian Michael Hartmann said, adding that he felt the chancellor’s office should be answering questions instead of the interior ministry.

“My personal impression: Before September 22, nothing is meant to be put on the table here,” Green party politician Wolfgang Wieland said, naming the date of federal elections in Germany.

Friedrich has so far stressed the NSA’s supposed contribution to stopping five terror plots in Germany, offering data on two of them to date, when discussing the issue. The minister controversially said on Monday that there was a “super-fundamental right” to protecting public safety that trumped even privacy laws.

British blow to EU data dreams?

Free Democrat politician Hartfried Wolff, a member of the Bundestag’s interior committee, said on Wednesday that Friedrich had outlined one blow to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s proposed response.

Merkel said in a key television interview on Sunday that she would be seeking unified EU rules on data protection to allow the bloc to handle the issue better.

According to Wolff, Friedrich said that the UK was unlikely to support such a move. Since Snowden went public, a UK espionage program called “Tempora” has also come to light.

Friedrich is a member of the Bavarian sister party of Merkel’s Christian Democrats, the CSU. Bavaria votes in state elections one week before the German ballot.

msh/rc (AFP, AP, Reuters)
Date 17.07.2013

Find this story at 717 July 2013

© 2013 Deutsche Welle

In Germany, the scandal surrounding NSA spying is getting odder by the day. A new Defense Ministry memo suggests a claim made by a mass-circulation newspaper that Germany’s army knew about Prism in 2011 is, in fact, true.

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.”

Prism Accessible Exclusively to Americans

Wolf describes in detail how the Bundeswehr and NATO have no access to the US program. He adds that while there may be computer terminals at the German base in Mazar-e-Sharif that are equipped to access the program, they can only be used by Americans.

If members of the Bundeswehr wanted access to information, they had to send a special form to the IJC command center in Kabul, almost entirely controlled by the US Army — that is, if they wanted US data that went beyond the information possessed by NATO intelligence. When they got the data back, “the origin of the information” was “fundamentally unrecognizable” to the Germans.

It is precisely such procedures that Bild reported on this week, citing a classified September NATO order. In the paper, NATO members, including the German-led Regional Command North in Afghanistan, are called upon to direct requests for the “Prism” system to American personnel — military or civilian (which in this case is a reference to intelligence workers) because NATO has no access to the system. Given that Bild printed a copy of the order in its newspaper, the BND’s portrayal already seemed odd on Wednesday.

According to Wolf’s own admissions, the Germans don’t know very much about the Prism program in Afghanistan. It is unclear, for example, how Prism is deployed at the US Army-dominated headquarters in Kabul and the ministry doesn’t know the “extent of use.” However, Wolf once more reiterated that all information obtained from intelligence sources served to protect German soldiers — including “insights provided by the US side that could have come from Prism.”

A Slap in the Face

The Defense Ministry is also very cautious compared to the BND when it comes to deferentiating the Prism program in Afghanistan from the Prism spying program that was exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and involves the systematic monitoring of German communications. The information supplied by the US would have pertained only to the situation in Afghanistan. It was “not a data fishing expedition” on German citizens, according to the memo, and in fact had “no proximity” to the NSA surveillance program in Germany and Europe.

With his cautious formulation, Wolf deliberately avoids saying whether or not the two programs are identical.

This representation of the facts, which was already made to some extent on Wednesday by Defense Ministry spokesman Stefan Paris, is like a slap in the face for the BND. Shortly after Seibert appeared at the press conference, insiders wondered why the intelligence agency would so unambiguously commit itself to the position that the Prism program in Afghanistan is part of the composite ISAF system. But the BND didn’t pull back on its position, although Paris clearly said that the Prism program in Afghanistan is operated exclusively by Americans.

Members of the opposition were quick to attack the BND for its assertions. “The Chancellery, acting on behalf of the BND, deliberately lied to the public on Wednesday,” Green Party defense expert Omid Nouripour told SPIEGEL ONLINE. According to Nouripour, Wolf’s description makes it clear that there is no NATO Prism program. The German government, he says, should stop making excuses and finally begin to seriously investigate the spying scandal.

07/18/2013 09:26 PM

By Matthias Gebauer

Find this story at 18 July 2013

© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2013

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency’s dominant role as the nation’s spy warehouse has spurred frequent tensions and turf fights with other federal intelligence agencies that want to use its surveillance tools for their own investigations, officials say.

Agencies working to curb drug trafficking, cyberattacks, money laundering, counterfeiting and even copyright infringement complain that their attempts to exploit the security agency’s vast resources have often been turned down because their own investigations are not considered a high enough priority, current and former government officials say.

Intelligence officials say they have been careful to limit the use of the security agency’s troves of data and eavesdropping spyware for fear they could be misused in ways that violate Americans’ privacy rights.

The recent disclosures of agency activities by its former contractor Edward J. Snowden have led to widespread criticism that its surveillance operations go too far and have prompted lawmakers in Washington to talk of reining them in. But out of public view, the intelligence community has been agitated in recent years for the opposite reason: frustrated officials outside the security agency say the spy tools are not used widely enough.

“It’s a very common complaint about N.S.A.,” said Timothy H. Edgar, a former senior intelligence official at the White House and at the office of the director of national intelligence. “They collect all this information, but it’s difficult for the other agencies to get access to what they want.”

“The other agencies feel they should be bigger players,” said Mr. Edgar, who heard many of the disputes before leaving government this year to become a visiting fellow at Brown University. “They view the N.S.A. — incorrectly, I think — as this big pot of data that they could go get if they were just able to pry it out of them.”

Smaller intelligence units within the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Secret Service, the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security have sometimes been given access to the security agency’s surveillance tools for particular cases, intelligence officials say.

But more often, their requests have been rejected because the links to terrorism or foreign intelligence, usually required by law or policy, are considered tenuous. Officials at some agencies see another motive — protecting the security agency’s turf — and have grown resentful over what they see as a second-tier status that has undermined their own investigations into security matters.

At the drug agency, for example, officials complained that they were blocked from using the security agency’s surveillance tools for several drug-trafficking cases in Latin America, which they said might be connected to financing terrorist groups in the Middle East and elsewhere.

At the Homeland Security Department, officials have repeatedly sought to use the security agency’s Internet and telephone databases and other resources to trace cyberattacks on American targets that are believed to have stemmed from China, Russia and Eastern Europe, according to officials. They have often been rebuffed.

Officials at the other agencies, speaking only on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the tensions, say the National Security Agency’s reluctance to allow access to data has been particularly frustrating because of post-Sept. 11 measures that were intended to encourage information-sharing among federal agencies.

In fact, a change made in 2008 in the executive order governing intelligence was intended to make it easier for the security agency to share surveillance information with other agencies if it was considered “relevant” to their own investigations. It has often been left to the national intelligence director’s office to referee the frequent disputes over how and when the security agency’s spy tools can be used. The director’s office declined to comment for this article.

Typically, the agencies request that the N.S.A. target individuals or groups for surveillance, search its databases for information about them, or share raw intelligence, rather than edited summaries, with them. If those under scrutiny are Americans, approval from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is required.

The security agency, whose mission is to spy overseas, and the F.B.I., its main partner in surveillance operations, dominate the process as the Justice Department’s main “customers” in seeking warrants from the intelligence court, with nearly 1,800 approved by the court last year.

In a statement, the security agency said that it “works closely with all intelligence community partners, and embeds liaison officers and other personnel at those agencies for the express purpose of ensuring N.S.A. is meeting their requirements and providing support to their missions.”

The security agency’s spy tools are attractive to other agencies for many reasons. Unlike traditional, narrowly tailored search warrants, those granted by the intelligence court often allow searches through records and data that are vast in scope. The standard of evidence needed to acquire them may be lower than in other courts, and the government may not be required to disclose for years, if ever, that someone was the focus of secret surveillance operations.

Decisions on using the security agency’s powers rest on many complicated variables, including a link to terrorism or “foreign intelligence,” the type of surveillance or data collection that is being conducted, the involvement of American targets, and the priority of the issue.

“Every agency wants to think that their mission has to be the highest priority,” said a former senior White House intelligence official involved in recent turf issues.

Other intelligence shops usually have quick access to N.S.A. tools and data on pressing matters of national security, like investigating a terrorism threat, planning battlefield operations or providing security for a presidential trip, officials say. But the conflicts arise during longer-term investigations with unclear foreign connections.

In pressing for greater access, a number of smaller agencies maintain that their cases involve legitimate national security threats and could be helped significantly by the N.S.A.’s ability to trace e-mails and Internet activity or other tools.

Drug agency officials, for instance, have sought a higher place for global drug trafficking on the intelligence community’s classified list of surveillance priorities, according to two officials.

Dawn Dearden, a drug agency spokeswoman, said it was comfortable allowing the N.S.A. and the F.B.I. to take the lead in seeking surveillance warrants. “We don’t have the authority, and we don’t want it, and that comes from the top down,” she said.

But privately, intelligence officials at the drug agency and elsewhere have complained that they feel shut out of the process by the N.S.A. and the F.B.I. from start to finish, with little input on what groups are targeted with surveillance and only sporadic access to the classified material that is ultimately collected.

Sometimes, security agency and bureau officials accuse the smaller agencies of exaggerating links to national security threats in their own cases when pushing for access to the security agency’s surveillance capabilities. Officials from the other agencies say that if a link to national security is considered legitimate, the F.B.I. will at times simply take over the case itself and work it with the N.S.A.

In one such case, the bureau took control of a Secret Service investigation after a hacker was linked to a foreign government, one law enforcement official said. Similarly, the bureau became more interested in investigating smuggled cigarettes as a means of financing terrorist groups after the case was developed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Mr. Edgar said officials in the national intelligence director’s office occasionally allow other agencies a role in identifying surveillance targets and seeing the results when it is relevant to their own inquiries. But more often, he acknowledged, the office has come down on the side of keeping the process held to an “exclusive club” at the N.S.A., the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, with help from the Central Intelligence Agency on foreign issues.

Officials in the national intelligence director’s office worry about opening the surveillance too widely beyond the security agency and the F.B.I. for fear of abuse, Mr. Edgar said. The two intelligence giants have been “burned” by past wiretapping controversies and know the political consequences if they venture too far afield, he added.

“I would have been very uncomfortable if we had let these other agencies get access to the raw N.S.A. data,” he said.

As furious as the public criticism of the security agency’s programs has been in the two months since Mr. Snowden’s disclosures, “it could have been much, much worse, if we had let these other agencies loose and we had real abuses,” Mr. Edgar said. “That was the nightmare scenario we were worried about, and that hasn’t happened.”

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.

August 3, 2013
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

Find this story at 3 August 2013

© 2013 The New York Times Company

BERLIN — When Edward J. Snowden disclosed the extent of the United States data mining operations in Germany, monitoring as many as 60 million of the country’s telephone and Internet connections in one day and bugging its embassy, politicians here, like others in Europe, were by turns appalled and indignant. But like the French before them, this week they found themselves backpedaling.

In an interview released this week Mr. Snowden said that Germany’s intelligence services are “in bed” with the National Security Agency, “the same as with most other Western countries.” The assertion has added to fresh scrutiny in the European news media of Berlin and other European governments that may have benefited from the enormous American snooping program known as Prism, or conducted wide-ranging surveillance operations of their own.

The outrage of European leaders notwithstanding, intelligence experts and historians say the most recent disclosures reflect the complicated nature of the relationship between the intelligence services of the United States and its allies, which have long quietly swapped information on each others’ citizens.

“The other services don’t ask us where our information is from and we don’t ask them,” Mr. Snowden said in the interview, conducted by the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras and Jacob Appelbaum, a computer security researcher, and published this week in the German magazine Der Spiegel. “This way they can protect their political leaders from backlash, if it should become public how massively the private spheres of people around the globe are being violated.”

Britain, which has the closest intelligence relationship with the United States of any European country, has been implicated in several of the data operations described by Mr. Snowden, including claims that Britain’s agencies had access to the Prism computer network, which monitors data from a range of American Internet companies. Such sharing would have allowed British intelligence agencies to sidestep British legal restrictions on electronic snooping. Prime Minister David Cameron has insisted that its intelligence services operate within the law.

Another allegation, reported by The Guardian newspaper, is that the Government Communications Headquarters, the British surveillance center, tapped fiber-optic cables carrying international telephone and Internet traffic, then shared the information with the N.S.A. This program, known as Tempora, involved attaching intercept probes to trans-Atlantic cables when they land on British shores from North America, the report said.

President François Hollande of France was among the first European leaders to express outrage at the revelations of American spying, and especially at accusations that the Americans had spied on French diplomatic posts in Washington and New York.

There is no evidence to date that French intelligence services were granted access to information from the N.S.A., Le Monde reported last week, however, that France’s external intelligence agency maintains a broad telecommunications data collection system of its own, amassing metadata on most, if not all, telephone calls, e-mails and Internet activity coming in and out of France.

Mr. Hollande and other officials have been notably less vocal regarding the claims advanced by Le Monde, which authorities in France have neither confirmed nor denied.

Given their bad experiences with domestic spying, first under the Nazis and then the former the East German secret police, Germans are touchy when it comes to issues of personal privacy and protection of their personal data. Guarantees ensuring the privacy of mail and all forms of long-distance communications are enshrined in Article 10 of their Constitution.

When the extent of the American spying in Germany came to light the chancellor’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, decried such behavior as “unacceptable,” insisting that, “We are no longer in the cold war.”

But experts say ties between the intelligence services remain rooted in agreements stemming from that era, when West Germany depended on the United States to protect it from the former Soviet Union and its allies in the East.

“Of course the German government is very deeply entwined with the American intelligence services,” said Josef Foschepoth, a German historian from Freiburg University. Mr. Foschepoth spent several years combing through Germany’s federal archives, including formerly classified documents from the 1950s and 1960s, in an effort to uncover the roots of the trans-Atlantic cooperation.

In 1965, Germany’s foreign intelligence service, known by the initials BND, was created. Three years later, the West Germans signed a cooperation agreement effectively binding the Germans to an intensive exchange of information that continues up to the present day, despite changes to the agreements.

The attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, in the United States saw a fresh commitment by the Germans to cooperate with the Americans in the global war against terror. Using technology developed by the Americans and used by the N.S.A., the BND monitors networks from the Middle East, filtering the information before sending it to Washington, said Erich Schmidt-Eenboom, an expert on secret services who runs the Research Institute for Peace Politics in Bavaria.

In exchange, Washington shares intelligence with Germany that authorities here say has been essential to preventing terror attacks similar to those in Madrid or London. It is a matter of pride among German authorities that they have been able to swoop in and detain suspects, preventing several plots from being carried out.

By focusing the current public debate in Germany on the issue of personal data, experts say Chancellor Angela Merkel is able to steer clear of the stickier questions about Germany’s own surveillance programs and a long history of intelligence sharing with the United States, which still makes many Germans deeply uncomfortable, more than two decades after the end of the cold war.

“Every postwar German government, at some point, has been confronted with this problem,” Mr. Foschepoth said of the surveillance scandal. “The way that the chancellor is handling it shows that she knows very well, she is very well informed and she wants the issue to fade away.”

Reporting contributed by Stephen Castle from London, Scott Sayare from Paris and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

July 9, 2013
By MELISSA EDDY

Find this story at 9 July 2013

© 2013 The New York Times Company