{"id":2148,"date":"2014-11-28T06:36:04","date_gmt":"2014-11-28T11:36:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=2148"},"modified":"2014-11-28T06:36:04","modified_gmt":"2014-11-28T11:36:04","slug":"the-german-bnd-and-american-nsa-cooperate-more-closely-than-thought-spiegel-online-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=2148","title":{"rendered":"The German BND and American NSA Cooperate More Closely than Thought &#8211; SPIEGEL ONLINE"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.spiegel.de\/international\/germany\/the-german-bnd-and-american-nsa-cooperate-more-closely-than-thought-a-975445.html\">The German BND and American NSA Cooperate More Closely than Thought &#8211; SPIEGEL ONLINE<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Three months before Edward Snowden shocked the world with his revelations, members of NSA&#8217;s &#8220;Special Source Operations department&#8221; sat down for a weekly meeting at their headquarters in the US state of Maryland. The group, considered internally to be particularly efficient, has several tasks, one of which is overseeing the intelligence agency&#8217;s delicate relationship with large telecommunications firms. It is the department that Snowden referred to as the &#8220;crown jewels&#8221; of the NSA.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; color: #000000;\"><\/span><span class=\"Apple-style-span\" style=\"font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; color: #000000;\">At this particular meeting, one significant slip-up was on the meeting agenda. On March 14, 2013, an SSO member had reported a potentially damaging incident. &#8220;Commercial consortium personnel&#8221; had apparently discovered the program &#8220;Wharpdrive,&#8221; for which SSO had tapped a fiber-optic cable. &#8220;Witting partner personnel have removed the evidence,&#8221; he explained further, &#8220;and a plausible cover story was provided.&#8221; According to an internal NSA document to which SPIEGEL has access, a team was quietly put together to to reinstall the program.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>The NSA, apparently, did not perform the highly sensitive operation on its own. All signs indicate that the agency had help from Germany&#8217;s Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the country&#8217;s foreign intelligence agency. The code name Wharpdrive appears in a paper drafted in preparation for a BND delegation&#8217;s visit to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, and which instructs NSA leaders to &#8220;thank the BND for their assistance with the trilateral program.&#8221; It also makes clear that the German agency plays a leadership role in the Wharpdrive program, with the NSA providing only technical assistance.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The German BND and American NSA Cooperate More Closely than Thought &#8211; SPIEGEL ONLINE. Three months before Edward Snowden shocked the world with his revelations, members of NSA&#8217;s &#8220;Special Source Operations department&#8221; sat down for a weekly meeting at their headquarters in the US state of Maryland. The group, considered internally to be particularly efficient, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[249,359,577,765,834],"class_list":["post-2148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-edward-snowden","tag-germany","tag-nsa","tag-surveillance","tag-us"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2148"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2149,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2148\/revisions\/2149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}