Snowdon is a dummy

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Big difference; the NSA spied on US citizens without a warrant or court authority. It's against the law in the US. What Germany does with other countries is NOT THE SAME

Not without court authority. Also, this part is domestic and really has nothing to do with Germany main gripe with the US, which was the US spying on her phone conversations.

However, it seems that some of has been know for a little while now.

German officials would not confirm Der Spiegel's report. Government spokeswoman Christiane Wirtz said only that the government in July informed a parliamentary intelligence committee about some of the matters in the report and would inform it about the rest soon. The panel is sworn to secrecy.

About four months ago, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, went to the Senate floor and accused the CIA of committing torture during the presidency of George W. Bush and of spying on the committee that she chairs as it was examining records of that torture. Brennan responded by denying both charges and leveling his own -- that investigators for the Senate Intelligence Committee had exceeded their lawful access to CIA records and that that constituted spying on the CIA.

Brennan even got his predecessor, George Tenet, under whose watch Feinstein claimed the torture had occurred and the attacks of 9/11 took place, to deny vehemently that his agents had committed torture. With this mutual finger-pointing, both the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee reported each other to the Department of Justice, which promptly punted.

How did all this come about? Under federal law, the CIA gets to do what the president permits and authorizes only when it reports its deeds and misdeeds truthfully to two congressional committees, one of which is the Senate Intelligence Committee. (The other is the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.) None of this is constitutional, of course, seeing as the CIA fights secret wars; the Constitution mandates that only Congress can declare war, and Congress cannot delegate its constitutional authority to committees. This system of secret government is so secret that 90 percent of our elected congressional representatives are kept ignorant of it.

How Germany Spies on Its Friends

By SPIEGEL Staff

For more than a year now, German officials have criticized the US for the NSA's mass spying on Europeans and even Chancellor Angela Merkel. Now, embarrassing revelations show that Germany has inadvertently spied on Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, and has also deliberately targeted Turkey.

It was mid-July, and the German government had something it could be a bit proud of. For the first time in the never-ending spying affair, it had reacted quickly, unanimously and toughly. A spy for the Americans had been exposed inside Germany's foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), and the government in Berlin ordered the CIA's top official in Germany to leave the country, demonstrating to Washington that it refused to put up with just anything. Berlin seemed to be going on the offensive.

It didn't last long. Four weeks later, Chancellor Angela Merkel's team is backpedaling. On Friday, the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that the BND -- even if apparently unintentionally -- had eavesdropped on a telephone conversation by then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The revelation made Merkel's dictum, "Spying among friends? That's unacceptable," ring a bit hollow.

Information obtained by SPIEGEL indicates that the affair goes beyond Clinton. Last year, it also drew in Clinton's successor, John Kerry, when he was mediating in the Middle East between the Israelis, the Palestinians and the Arab states. At the time, the recording of at least one Kerry conversation was apparently immediately deleted by the BND under orders.

The fact that Clinton's conversation apparently wasn't deleted is one of many oddities in the NSA scandal that is filled with them. And it is the product of a number of unfortunate coincidences within the BND.

'By-Catch'

For years, the BND has intercepted satellite telephone conversations from its listening station in Bad Aibling in Bavaria in order to obtain knowledge of the Islamist terrorist scene. But intelligence sources now say that US office holders have also fallen into the BND's crosshairs while making satellite telephone calls from airplanes. Sources described it as a kind of unintentional "by-catch".

That's how Clinton got caught in the BND's net in 2012. The former secretary of state had telephoned with former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. At the time, he was serving as the joint UN-Arab League special envoy for the Syrian crisis. Annan had just left the latest negotiations in Syria and wanted to provide Clinton with an update.

Following protocol, staff at BND headquarters prepared a several-page-long transcript of the conversation and passed it along to senior agency officials. They in turn ordered that the transcript be destroyed. Sources say that the document was not forwarded to Merkel's Chancellery.

But the person tasked with destroying the transcript was Markus R., an employee in the agency's Areas of Operations/Foreign Relations department, who also turns out to be the same man recently accused of serving as an agent for the Americans.

R. apparently had no intention of immediately destroying the transcript. Instead, he allegedly added it to the other 217, in some cases highly sensitive, BND documents that he is suspected of having delivered to the Americans. German investigators discovered the documents on a USB stick during a search of R.'s home at the beginning of July.

Further Deep Blow to German-American Ties

The Americans have now turned the tables and, in internal discussions, are accusing the Germans of hypocrisy. The official line in German security circles is that "allied countries were not and are not our reconnaissance targets". Sources also pointed out that, since the middle of last year, the BND has been under orders by the Chancellery to immediately purge any such by-catch -- it isn't even supposed to be forwarded to senior officials in the foreign intelligence agency. Still, the case represents another deep blow in German-American relations that are already battered.

On Friday, high-ranking members of the German government expressed deep frustration over the matter. Sources in Berlin said government officials had ordered a comprehensive assessment report on the eavesdropping by-catch from the BND. The report is also expected to go beyond the accidental by-catch to address what promises to be an even more explosive issue.

Among the documents allegedly pilfered by Markus R. is one addressing a second, highly sensitive matter: the so-called "order profile" with which the federal government determines the BND's working focus every four years. The profile currently being used was agreed to in 2009 and hasn't been renewed yet because of the NSA scandal. A new version is expected in the coming months.

SPIEGEL has learned from sources that Turkey is one of the BND focuses included in the BND order profile, making the country an official target for the foreign intelligence agency's espionage efforts. The fact that the German intelligence service, at the behest of the government, has targeted a NATO ally could undermine recent efforts by the German government to resolve tensions between Berlin and Ankara.

Without providing the source for the following, I would like to see anyone refute the claims of this article.

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About four months ago, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, went to the Senate floor and accused the CIA of committing torture during the presidency of George W. Bush and of spying on the committee that she chairs as it was examining records of that torture. Brennan responded by denying both charges and leveling his own -- that investigators for the Senate Intelligence Committee had exceeded their lawful access to CIA records and that that constituted spying on the CIA.

Brennan even got his predecessor, George Tenet, under whose watch Feinstein claimed the torture had occurred and the attacks of 9/11 took place, to deny vehemently that his agents had committed torture. With this mutual finger-pointing, both the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee reported each other to the Department of Justice, which promptly punted.

How did all this come about? Under federal law, the CIA gets to do what the president permits and authorizes only when it reports its deeds and misdeeds truthfully to two congressional committees, one of which is the Senate Intelligence Committee. (The other is the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.) None of this is constitutional, of course, seeing as the CIA fights secret wars; the Constitution mandates that only Congress can declare war, and Congress cannot delegate its constitutional authority to committees. This system of secret government is so secret that 90 percent of our elected congressional representatives are kept ignorant of it.

Unless this unnamed source is the entire of the Supreme Court...with a majority of the Justices voting that it is unconstitutional...

...all we have is another ci proclaiming something that he has no authority to proclaim.

So it was at the behest of the Government.

Well, it's interesting. So, before BND sets our their target lists, they have to run it by Germany's parliament intelligent committee first? Apparently Turkey has been an official target since 2009, the first the committee heard of it was last month?

The Parliamentary Control Panel (PKGr) has been tasked with supervising the Militärischer Abschirmdienst (MAD – Military Counterintelligence Service), the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND – Federal Intelligence Service) and the BfV. The PKGr is vested with extensive supervisory powers, to include the right to inspect records, the right of admission to all official premises of the intelligence services and the right to interview members of the intelligence services. On the other hand, members of the intelligence services are entitled to directly contact the PKGr in connection with official matters without going through the proper channels.

What I am getting at how did Spiegel get all this information, is it all released voluntarily by the German government?