CIA Didn't Bother Informing Obama About Blown Cover Of German Double Agent Before His Call With Merkel

from the finding-out-from-the-papers-again dept

We've pointed out before how bizarre it is that President Obama seems to gleefully admit that he's almost totally in the dark about what the intelligence community is doing. Last year, he admitted that he keeps finding out what the NSA is doing from the press reports on the Snowden documents and then he goes to ask what the NSA has been up to. It appears this "keep him in the dark" status is reaching new and ridiculous heights. As you probably heard, over the weekend the Germans arrested an employee of the German BND, who had apparently been spying for the Americans (via the CIA), and who had been tasked with keeping tabs on the German investigation into the Snowden leaks. This morning, there are reports about a second spy as well. Reports suggest that the first guy was a bit of a bumbling buffoon who was caught because he sent via email classified documents to the Russians, offering to spy for them as well (leading to an investigation that turned up his existing spying activities for the CIA), but it's still a diplomatic black eye for the US.

However, the craziest bit about this is that no one bothered to inform the President that the cover of a CIA plant had been blown in Germany -- even though President Obama was scheduled to talk to Angela Merkel a day after the arrest. While that call went off without a hitch, and the spy wasn't brought up, the fact that President Obama was apparently unaware of the situation, once again, raises serious questions about the rogue nature of the intelligence community. No one expects the President to know specifically about CIA plants, but once one is blown -- especially concerning a big ally where previous revelations already made a bit of a diplomatic mess -- you'd think that someone inside the intelligence community would think to brief the President.

Filed Under: angela merkel, barak cobama, bnd, cia, ed snownde, germany, nsa, surveillance

Germany To Begin Formal Investigation Into NSA Surveillance -- But Only Of Angela Merkel

from the one-rule-for-them,-one-rule-for-us dept

The German government has been trying to avoid upsetting either the US by denouncing the large-scale surveillance being carried out by the NSA in its country, or the German people by not denouncing it. It finds itself in the same quandary as regards opening a formal investigation into the spying, which is probably why it has held off for so long. But now, the German authorities have come up with a sort of compromise, as GigaOM reports:

Germany's federal prosecutor has launched the country's first formal investigation into the activities of the NSA in Germany, specifically the U.S. intelligence agency's reported bugging of Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone.

Harald Range said on Wednesday that the other potential avenue of investigation -- that of the surveillance of the German people -- remained open, though no investigation was being launched yet due to a lack of evidence.

Leaving aside the question just how much evidence the federal prosecutor needs before he investigates whether the German people have been subjected to US surveillance -- a signed confession from President Obama perhaps? -- the other issue here is the astonishing lack of sensitivity this move displays. The German government seems to be saying that spying is outrageous and must be investigated immediately if it's directed against the powerful; but if it's against the little people, then, well, sorry: we need more evidence before we could possibly risk upsetting the US.

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Filed Under: angela merkel, germany, high court, nsa, surveillance

German Government Blocks Ed Snowden From Testifying Before Parliament So As Not To Upset The US

from the we-delicate-flowers dept

A month ago, we wrote about how the German Parliament was opening hearings in the NSA's surveillance of German citizens (including Chancellor Angela Merkel) and that some of the lawmakers wanted Ed Snowden to testify (either in person, or providing evidence remotely). At the time, it was noted that "analysts believe Merkel’s government will find a way to sidestep such a move." And, indeed, that's exactly what's happened. The German government has blocked any such testimony for fear of upsetting the American government.

In a letter to members of a parliamentary committee obtained by Süddeutsche Zeitung, government officials say a personal invitation for the US whistleblower would "run counter to the political interests of the Federal Republic", and "put a grave and permanent strain" on US-German relations.

Because the American government is apparently so insecure that it can't handle Ed Snowden testifying to the German Parliament? Really? Sometimes, when you look at world diplomacy, it looks like a bunch of elementary school kids. What happened to mature adults who can disagree about things without it causing an international incident?

Apparently, the Green Party is looking to challenge this decision, but it seems unlikely to change.

Filed Under: angela merkel, diplomacy, ed snowden, germany, nsa, surveillance

Germany Opens Hearings On NSA Spying, Want To Offer Safe Passage For Snowden To Come To Berlin

from the but-then-what dept

Last fall, one of the big stories concerning NSA surveillance efforts was around the fact that it had spied on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone calls. While this didn't sound particularly surprising (spying on foreign leaders is kind of what you expect intelligence agencies to do), from a diplomacy standpoint, it certainly was awkward. In response to this, the White House agreed to stop spying on her, but it appears to have simply shifted to spying on everyone she talks to. Just a few days ago, new leaks showed how NSA partner-in-spying, GCHQ out of the UK directly targeted Merkel with its spying tools.

Given all of this, Germany has now launched hearings into the spying done by the US, and apparently some lawmakers would like to bring Ed Snowden to testify in person:

The hearings also have the potential to provoke further antipathy. Indeed, a number of lawmakers here are now demanding safe passage to Berlin for Snowden — who is living in self-imposed exile in Moscow — to testify before the eight-person committee. Any such move would likely outrage the United States, which is seeking to take Snowden into custody.

Given the potential for angering Washington, analysts believe Merkel’s government will find a way to sidestep such a move. Nevertheless, the push to give Snowden his day here serves as another reminder that, even as the scandal appears to be dissipating in other parts of Europe, it remains at the top of the agenda in Germany.

As noted above, this seems unlikely to happen and is almost certainly just for show. I would imagine that Snowden himself might not feel all that safe in Berlin either, given its close ties to the US, though potentially he could use a trip to Berlin as a launching point to go somewhere else (one issue he's had in seeking asylum is that many countries say you have to be present in that country before requesting asylum). Also, there's a separate issue that suggests much of this is just for show, which is that Germany's own intelligence agencies are likely involved in similar activities themselves. So while it makes sense from a political standpoint to stomp and scream about all of this, it's doubtful that Germany will do too much, for fear that its own intelligence practices will become public as well.

Filed Under: angela merkel, ed snowden, germany, nsa, surveillance

New NSA Leakers Reveal NSA Switched From Spying On Merkel... To All Her Chief Advisors

from the well,-of-course dept

It's long forgotten now, but back in August, the US and Germany were said to be working on an agreement not to spy on each other's governments. As we noted at the time, such an agreement would almost certainly be meaningless. Of course, that news came out after the initial Snowden leaks, but prior to the high profile news in October that the NSA was monitoring German Chancellor Angela Merkel's calls. While President Obama (after first claiming he had no idea it was happening) promised Merkel that the NSA would stop spying on her phone calls, by January, those plans for a big "bilateral no-spy deal" were basically dead.

And, indeed, over the weekend, German newspaper Bild am Sonntag reported that the NSA may have stopped bugging Merkel's phone, but instead it had started bugging the phones of basically everyone around her, including pretty much every senior government official who reported to her. The report quotes a "high-ranking NSA employee in Germany" explaining what's going on:

"We have had the order not to miss out on any information now that we are no longer able to monitor the chancellor's communication directly," it quoted the NSA employee as saying.

This shouldn't be that surprising. This is what the NSA is going to do, after all. But what amazes me about this story is the fact that it's already leaked out, and that despite all the talk of cracking down on future leaks out of the NSA, the NSA already has another leaker releasing information that is clearly politically sensitive. So many folks like to point to Snowden as if he's the only leaker the NSA ever had or ever will have. But it's increasingly looking like there are others within the NSA who are equally uncomfortable with what's become of the intelligence community.

Filed Under: angela merkel, germany, nsa, spying

John McCain Says That Keith Alexander Should Be Fired... For All The Wrong Reasons

from the what-about-prosecuted dept

Senator John McCain, who is certainly considered more "hawkish" on national intelligence and thus a lot more likely to support the NSA, made some interesting statements in a recent interview with the German paper Der Spiegel, including saying that President Obama should fire Keith Alexander. While that might surprise you, the reality is that he does so for all the wrong reasons -- mainly, he doesn't blame Alexander for illegal spying. He blames Alexander for letting word get out that we were spying on "friends."

SPIEGEL: Are the intelligence services out of control?

McCain: There has not been sufficient congressional oversight, and there has been an absolutely disgraceful sharing of information that never should have taken place. For many years, we had an absolute provision that any classified information, which was going to be shared, is based on need-to-know information. I was a Navy pilot and had Top Secret clearance because I was in a squadron that in case of war with Russia would carry nuclear weapons. But that did not mean that I was privy to everything to do with all of our war plans in case of a nuclear war.

SPIEGEL: That means that you only knew what you absolutely had to know.

McCain: Yes. Then along came 9/11 and we said, "Oh, one of the reasons why we didn't know about 9/11 is that we didn't do enough information sharing." So now we have a private in the Army with access to most secret cables.

SPIEGEL: You mean Private First Class Bradley Manning, now Chelsea, who leaked thousands of secret documents to Wikileaks.

McCain: And now we have a contractor employee, not a government employee, who has access to information which is, when revealed, most damaging to the standing prestige of the United States and our relations with some of our best friends. Why did Edward Snowden have that information? And what are we doing as far as screening people who have access to this information? It's outrageous, and someone ought to be held accountable.

SPIEGEL: Who must be held accountable?

McCain: The head of the NSA, the president of the United States, the Congressional Intelligence Committees, all of these contractors we pay that were responsible for performing the background checks. There should be a wholesale housecleaning.

SPIEGEL: Should Keith Alexander, head of the NSA, resign?

McCain: Of course, they should resign or be fired. We no longer hold anybody accountable in Washington. The Commandant of the Marine Corps fired a couple of generals because of failure of security at a base in Afghanistan. Tell me who has been fired for anything that's gone bad in this town.

Notice that it's not because of the spying that Alexander should be fired... but rather because people like Manning and Snowden were able to leak documents.

And, yes, elsewhere in the interview, McCain does complain about the extent of the NSA's spying... but not on ordinary Americans. No, the only thing that seems to upset him about it is when it impacts our relationships with "friends" in foreign governments. Look at this key quote:

SPIEGEL: In your opinion, how should intelligence services define the lines that must not be crossed?

McCain: The limit should be the potential damage to relations with that country. In other words, is it worth the collateral damage that could result in those techniques being revealed? What would be the reaction of our friends to it?

Notice absolutely no mention of things like people's rights to privacy? Notice absolutely no mention of concern for citizens either in the US or elsewhere? Nope. His only concern is when the spying might "damage relations" with a friendly country. Incredible.

Elsewhere in the interview, McCain scoffs at the idea that Germany might offer Snowden asylum, saying "we're too good friends" for Germany to do such a horrible thing. He also insists that he knows Snowden revealed everything to the Russians, despite no evidence to support this. He says that if you don't believe Snowden revealed everything to the Russians, "then you believe that pigs can fly." Furthermore, he calls Snowden a "defector," which is simply factually inaccurate. Snowden was forced into the Russians' hands by the US's clumsy approach to trying to stop him.

The only thing that seems to offend McCain is (1) that we let "low level" people like Manning and Snowden have access to secrets and (2) that we might offend a few "high level" friends. It's the complaint of an ultimate insider, who only cares about friends in high places and has absolutely no concern whatsoever for the common people he hasn't been in touch with in decades.

Filed Under: angela merkel, bradley manning, chelsea manning, ed snowden, germany, john mccain, keith alexander, surveillance

How NSA Spying On Angela Merkel May Scuttle TAFTA/TTIP Trade Agreement

from the another-good-deed-by-Snowden dept

There's been plenty of attention paid to the news of the past week or so about the NSA spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone. While some still insist this is no big deal, the eventual consequences could be a very big deal. First off, remember that it was just a few months ago that (in the wake of the initial Snowden leaks), the US and Germany had made a silly pledge, which no one believed, that they wouldn't spy on each other. That "agreement" is already being put to the test.

As we discussed last week, the real "casualty" from all of these discussions may actually be that America can't get away with being a massive hypocrite anymore, despite so much of its foreign and domestic policy being built around being able to get away with just that. And, a large part of that is how the US pushes other countries into very questionable trade agreements -- another thing that we've been following for years. And those two things may be on a collision course. For quite some time now, we've been discussing the big trade agreement that the EU and the US are working towards, called TAFTA or TTIP. But one of the lesser noticed points about the revelations of the spying on Merkel is that many people in Germany are saying that negotiations on this agreement should be put on hold:

The chancellor's office is also now considering the possibility that the much-desired trans-Atlantic free trade agreement could fail if the NSA affair isn't properly cleared up. Since the latest revelations came out, some 58 percent of Germans say they support breaking off ongoing talks, while just 28 percent are against it. "We should put the negotiations for a free-trade agreement with the US on ice until the accusations against the NSA have been clarified," says Economy Minister Ilse Aigner, a member of the Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party to Merkel's Christian Democrats.

There are many reasons why TAFTA/TTIP is looking like a bad deal anyway, having nothing to do with the NSA spying, but if the Snowden docs lead to that agreement being put "on ice" for a while, that seems like another useful outcome.

Filed Under: angela merkel, nsa, nsa surveillance, tafta, trade agreements, trust, ttip

President Obama Says He Had No Idea His Own NSA Was Spying On Angela Merkel

from the that-seems-like-a-problem dept

So, last week, there was the report that German Chancellor Angela Merkel had found out about the US NSA spying on her mobile phone and had made an angry call to President Obama. As we noted, US officials made perhaps the weakest response ever, insisting that they weren't monitoring her phone today and promising that they wouldn't monitor it in the future -- but absolutely refusing to comment on whether or not the NSA had done so in the past. Of course, that just called much more attention to the obvious implication that they had -- and it took just a couple days before Spiegel revealed the details. Not only had the NSA been monitoring Merkel's mobile phone, but they'd been doing it for over a decade, since before she was in power:

There are strong indications that it was the SCS that targeted the cell phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel. This is suggested by a document that apparently comes from an NSA database in which the agency records its targets. This document, which SPIEGEL has seen, is what set the cell phone scandal in motion.

The document contains Merkel's cell phone number. An inquiry to her team revealed that it is the number the chancellor uses mainly to communicate with party members, ministers and confidants, often by text message. The number is, in the language of the NSA, a "Selector Value." The next two fields determine the format ("raw phone number") and the "Subscriber," identified as "GE Chancellor Merkel."

[....] The time stamp is noteworthy. The order was transferred to the "National Sigint Requirements List," the list of national intelligence targets, in 2002. That was the year Germany held closely watched parliamentary elections and Merkel battled Edmund Stoiber of Bavaria's Christian Social Union to become the conservatives' chancellor candidate. It was also the year the Iraq crisis began heating up. The document also lists status: "A" for active. This status was apparently valid a few weeks before President Obama's Berlin visit in June 2013.

Spiegel has a lot more, including some revealing information about how the NSA uses the US embassy in Berlin to intercept all kinds of communications.

But then there's this incredible claim: President Obama insists he had no idea about it when he spoke to Merkel:

Merkel spoke with Obama on Wednesday afternoon, calling him from her secure landline in her Chancellery office. Both spoke English. According to the Chancellery, the president said that he had known nothing of possible monitoring, otherwise he would have stopped it. Obama also expressed his deepest regrets and apologized.

Now, remember, this is the very same President Obama, who just a couple months ago claimed that every time more Snowden news broke, it would be the first he'd heard about some of these programs, and he'd have to go ask the NSA what they were really doing. Could this be one of those situations? It seems almost impossible to believe that the NSA would be spying on the head of state of one of our closest allies without the President being aware. As the Spiegel report notes, those kinds of orders would have to be renewed with approval from the top:

Among the politically decisive questions is whether the spying was authorized from the top: from the US president. If the data is accurate, the operation was authorized under former President George W. Bush and his NSA chief, Michael Hayden. But it would have had to be repeatedly approved, including after Obama took office and up to the present time. Is it conceivable that the NSA made the German chancellor a surveillance target without the president's knowledge?

However, after trying to avoid the question, over the weekend, the NSA admitted that Keith Alexander had never briefed the President about spying on Merkel (though, it's possible he heard about it from others).

This makes it sound, again, like the NSA has gone rogue. How can President Obama seriously allow Keith Alexander and James Clapper to remain in charge when they've just made him look like a complete fool, supposedly totally unaware of what his own intelligence apparatus is up to -- especially when it concerns programs that, once revealed, can have a serious negative impact on a variety of diplomatic fronts?

And for what benefit? The Spiegel report makes it clear that the NSA saw little value in spying on Merkel. They just did it because... reasons.

Former NSA employee Thomas Drake does not see this as a contradiction. "After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Germany became intelligence target number one in Europe," he says. The US government did not trust Germany, because some of the Sept. 11 suicide pilots had lived in Hamburg. Evidence suggests that the NSA recorded Merkel once and then became intoxicated with success, says Drake. "It has always been the NSA's motto to conduct as much surveillance as possible," he adds.

The fact that President Obama hasn't yet fired Alexander in particular is fairly incredible, given this latest revelation.

Filed Under: angela merkel, barack obama, germany, keith alexander, nsa, nsa surveillance

White House Assures German Chancellor It Is Not And Will Not Monitor Her Calls... Won't Comment On The Past

from the says-a-lot dept

Another day, another foreign country realizing that the NSA is spying on its leadership. This time around, it's Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel, alerted to the possibility by reporters working on Snowden documents for Spiegel, called President Obama to confront him about evidence that the NSA was monitoring her mobile phone calls.

During her conversation with Obama, Merkel expressed her expectation that "US authorities would provide an explanation about the possible extent of such surveillance practices, and thus answer questions that the German government already posed months ago," Seibert said.

"As a close ally of the United States of America, the German government expects a clear contractual agreement on the activities of the agencies and their cooperation," he added.

Of course, as with similar revelations recently concerning Brazil, France and Mexico, none of this should really be all that surprising. Spying agencies spy on top elected officials and bureaucrats in other countries all the time. It's what they do. A lot of the reaction to getting caught is just political theater. It's embarrassing, but not nearly as big a deal as governments spying on citizens. That said, the amusing bit is this:

"The President assured the Chancellor that the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of Chancellor Merkel."

Oh, and this:

The spokeswoman did not wish to specify whether this statement applied to the past.

And this:

[the] NSA, asked [about the White House's] statement wording, officially says it has nothing to add [about] whether Merkel was targeted in the past

Yup. Genius move by the White House spin doctors there. Say we're not monitoring and won't in the future, calling that much more attention to the question of "in the past" and then refuse to make any statements about that.

Filed Under: angela merkel, barack obama, espionage, germany, nsa, nsa surveillance, us, white house

German Chancellor Says Only Print Media Can Teach You 'Real' Reading

from the smelly-logic dept

Angela Merkel may be Germany's Chancellor, and therefore a busy woman, but since she trained as a chemist, you might expect her to have a more positive view about new technology than this statement from a recent interview (original video in German), reported by the Netzpolitik blog, would suggest:

I regard the print media as very important. Being able to read is quite another thing from being on the Internet -- something that naturally will grow, and increase in importance. Nonetheless, the ability to read is something very, very important. And therefore I hope that, alongside the strong development of all the new media, all the well-known newspapers, the print media, the magazines, have a good future.

What's strange here is that the vast majority of those newspapers and magazines publish all or most of their articles online as well as in printed versions. The words are identical, so what magic ingredient does Frau Merkel think is missing online? It can't be the readability, since digital versions are arguably more legible, thanks to the ability to change the print size for those whose eyesight is not what it was.

The only real difference is that online versions are insubstantial, simply an image on a screen, while printed versions consist of ink on paper. Maybe her comment does, in fact, reflect her past as a chemist, and what she secretly misses is that characteristic odor of printing inks. Perhaps she just needs a iSmell Personal Scent Synthesizer device or equivalent.

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Filed Under: angela merkel, digital, germany, reading