NSA: German Federal Prosecutor Seeks to Discredit SPIEGEL Reporting – SPIEGEL ONLINE.
In June, German Federal Prosecutor Harald Range opened an official investigation into allegations the NSA spied on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone. So far, though, he hasn’t made much progress.
The US signals intelligence agency has ignored all questions submitted by Range’s investigative authority. And Germany’s own foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), hasn’t provided any further assistance.
SPIEGEL first drew the German government’s attention to the actions in the autumn of 2013 when it reported on information from an NSA database entry about the tapping of Merkel’s phone. “That’s why I asked the reporters at SPIEGEL to answer questions about the document or to provide it to us. But the newsmagazine, citing the right of the press to refuse to give evidence, did not comply”, the federal prosecutor said during his annual press conference in Karlsruhe on Thursday. He seemed frustrated.
In his statement, Range insinuated that “the document that has been perceived by the public as proof of the actual tapping of the mobile telephone is not actually an authentic NSA order for signals intelligence.” He also claimed it didn’t come from an NSA database. “A SPIEGEL editor produced it himself, stating it was based on an NSA document which had been seen.”
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