The German government has demanded answers from the British state with regard to revelations by Edward Snowden that the British spy agency GCHQ has a program called Tempora that allows it to capture massive amounts of telephone calls and email from transatlantic fiber optic cables that land first in the UK before they extend to continental Europe.
250 US National Security Agency analysts also are assigned full-time to Tempora and 850,000 NSA workers and contractors have access to the gargantuan Tempora database.
Emails between two people inside Germany might nevertheless bounce around the world before being delivered, so that GCHQ could well be scooping up in-country data that happens to come through those cables. They are certainly collecting huge amounts of communications by Americans, but the US media for the most part has buried this story. ( Wired is an exception.)
East Germans were subjected to intensive domestic surveillance by the STASI secret police in the Communist period 1945-1989, and before that the National Socialists were not exactly shy about invading people’s privacy.
Most Germans therefore have special sensitivities about domestic surveillance. Which is a way of saying that they have a lively Fascism Meter, which Americans and the British used to have but it seems to have atrophied.
Eavesdropping on the Planet
German security experts discovered several years ago that ECHELON was engaged in heavy commercial spying in Europe. Victims included such German firms as the wind generator manufacturer Enercon. In 1998, Enercon developed what it thought was a secret invention, enabling it to generate electricity from wind power at a far cheaper rate than before. However, when the company tried to market its invention in the United States, it was confronted by its American rival, Kenetech, which announced that it had already patented a near-identical development. Kenetech then brought a court order against Enercon to ban the sale of its equipment in the US. In a rare public disclosure, an NSA employee, who refused to be named, agreed to appear in silhouette on German television to reveal how he had stolen Enercon’s secrets by tapping the telephone and computer link lines that ran between Enercon’s research laboratory and its production unit some 12 miles away. Detailed plans of the company’s invention were then passed on to Kenetech.
In 1994, Thomson S.A., located in Paris, and Airbus Industrie, based in Blagnac Cedex, France, also lost lucrative contracts, snatched away by American rivals aided by information covertly collected by NSA and CIA. The same agencies also eavesdropped on Japanese representatives during negotiations with the United States in 1995 over auto parts trade.
German industry has complained that it is in a particularly vulnerable position because the government forbids its security services from conducting similar industrial espionage. “German politicians still support the rather naive idea that political allies should not spy on each other’s businesses. The Americans and the British do not have such illusions,” said journalist Udo Ulfkotte, a specialist in European industrial espionage, in 1999.
