Germany most snooped EU country by US

Headquarters of the NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland. 

The US National Security Agency (NSA) snoops on all EU member states and on Germany the most, new data reveals. A color-coded map of secret surveillance activities by the NSA ranks countries according to how much they are surveilled – green for the least and red for the most watched.

All EU member states have variant shades of green except for Germany, which is color-coded orange. The NSA tool, called Boundless Informant, is among the documents disclosed by 29-year-old Edward Snowden who has since sought refuge in Hong Kong. Snowden, who has worked at the NSA for the past four years on a number of outside contracts, said some NSA analysts have blanket power to spy on anyone for any reason.

“I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authority to wire-tap anyone … even if you are not doing anything wrong, you are being watched and recorded,” he told The Guardian newspaper.
Boundless Informant reveals that some 3 billion pieces of metadata intelligence was gathered over a 30-day period, says The Guardian. Metadata includes calls made, location of the phone, time of the call and duration.

The tool comes with an operational handbook and says it uses “big data technology to query SIGINT [signals intelligence] collection in the cloud to produce near real-time business intelligence describing the agency’s available SIGINT infrastructure and coverage.” Read more >>