Germany’s external intelligence service BND had snooped into the Internet and telephone communications of millions of German citizens and passed on their data to top American spy agency NSA, media reports said.
The BND cooperated quite extensively with the US spy agency between 2004 and 2008 in a project codenamed “operation Eikonal” and systematically monitored domestic and global Internet and telephone traffic through one of the world’s largest telecommunication hubs in Frankfurt.
large amounts of data collected were transferred to the NSA, TV networks NDR and WDR as well as Munich daily Sued Deutsche Zeitung reported over the weekend.
A special computer programme was supposed to filter out the data of German users from the global data transfer to avoid violation of the country’s laws. However, that did not function properly and thereby allowed continued flow of their data to the NSA, the reports said quoting top secret documents.
Germany and the US had agreed to boost cooperation between their intelligence services after 2001 attacks.