After Edward Snowden’s revelations about the extent of spying being carried out around the world by the NSA and its Five Eyes friends, there have been a number of attempts in other countries to find out what has been going on. One of the most thoroughgoing of these is in Germany, where there is a major parliamentary inquiry into NSA activities in that country. As Techdirt reported back in May, a surprising piece of information to emerge from this is that Germany’s secret service has been carrying out spying on behalf of the NSA, which sent across various “selectors” — search terms — that it wanted investigated in the German spies’ surveillance databases.

One group of people particularly shocked to hear this were the German parliamentarians who make up the G10 Commission that must approve spying operations in Germany. A post on Intellectual Property Watch explains why:
The German Foreign Intelligence Services, supported by the government, tapped the German Internet Exchange Point Decix, the largest internet exchange point globally. While the G10 Commission had approved the blanket tapping, they were unaware that some of the tapped data were forwarded to the NSA, the US National Security Agency, based on a list of so-called “selectors” — names or numbers the NSA sent to their German colleagues.

Read the Full Article: Source – Tech Dirt
Browsing Privacy: (Tech Dirt) – German Parliament Spy Oversight Board Sues German Government Over Data Sharing With NSA

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