Last UPDATE: October 30 (II)
Ozapft Is ! - It's Tapped !
German adage used in the introduction of the Munich Oktoberfest(Munich beer festival) when the very first beer barrel is broached.
The German expression "anzapfen", applied here in the Bavarian
dialect, has the meaning of, both, "broaching" and "tapping".
The Alliance of Domestic Servants
These days, there is shame and scandal in the Western family because of leaked information on America's domestic spy agency NSA allegedly tapping the phones of prominent foreign leaders like German Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel and French president François Hollande. According to a German press information, the Merkel handy tapping should have started as early as 2002.
An outraged Mrs. Merkel.
Actually, that spy scandal should be no surprise at all, as security administrations within the Western alliance are known to exchange information and data on an informal basis already for a considerable time. Such procedure was originally intended to help fighting espionage on behalf of the former Soviet Union and its satellites. Nowadays and since September 11, fighting terrorism has become the main goal.
However, misuse of such multilateral cooperation was already suspected during the times that followed the decay of the Soviet empire. A U.S. facility for radio intelligence for instance, situated near the German town of Bad Aibling, was not immediately closed after surveillance of radiotelephony in Eastern Europe lost its importance. Instead, it remained in operation until 2002 when its equipment and staff were transferred to a similar station in Britain. In the meantime, the South-German facility was rumoured to monitor telephone calls in neighbouring regions like France and Switzerland. Some local newspaper even implied they were tapping phone calls related to banking and finance services. For more information, refer to a comprehensive German source including some English text.
Adding to unilateral misuse, illegal cooperation between U.S. intelligence specialists and their foreign homologues might have been as well at the very beginning of the actual spy scandal.
One especially mysterious story is covering the fact that, in 1990, lots of most important documents vanished from the archives of the East-German Ministry of State Security ("Stasi") just before the entitled committee of citizens could get their hands on them. These documents, enabling the identification of Stasi spies at home and abroad, suddenly appeared in the U.S.A. and were not returned before 2003, i.e. after the German reunification. They became known as the so-called Rosenholz documents. As the Ministry of State Security found itself under siege during the last days of the German Democratic Republic under Communist rule, such thing could only happen with the knowledge and aid of certain (East-/West-)German or Russian insiders. The U.S. side did not officially comment on this. However, it was rumoured the CIA office in Berlin was acting on direct order of president Bush jr.
Similar cases are known from the military sphere were guys of different nationality but equal thinking come to a cooperation that is exceeding their competences.
Only to remember that, in 2007, a high-ranking German officer, stationed on the ISAF airbase of Mazar-e Sharif in Afghanistan and which had been considered for long as a tiny airfield at the end of the world, told German journalists there were no U.S. troops in the immediate neighbourhood for any possible cooperation. This, however, was a vital item at that time because suspicion was already raised against the war policy of former U.S. president Bush jr., and there were fears of an automatic German involvement in some combat activity that would have required an additional mandate from Germany's parliament ("Bundestag").
In a certain way, the officer's description was correct as the next U.S. contingent seemed to be about 3 km away: German troops at one end and U.S. troops at the other end of a comparatively long runway that could have served the biggest U.S. troop carriers as a landing place. The runway's military use, however, was far more advanced than the ISAF Afghanistan mission might let imagine. It was fitting into the strategic plannings of a possible incursion into Iran targeting its capital Tehran and which could not be reached such easily from the Persian Gulf. But that's just another story already told before.
After the interview, a well-known German magazine published a friendly article on those brave German peacekeepers at the end of the world and showed a picture of the tiny airfield tower, dating back to the times of the Taliban like the original runway that was no longer in use. There was no hint that German and U.S. airmen were jointly operating the airbase, even though later information (source: DVIDS report in 2010) confirmed continued U.S. interest in the airlift capacities of Mazar-e Sharif.
Same goes with a German colonel who required U.S. air support when petrol was diverted from a stolen truck by some poor Afghan devils. The air raid in September 2009 killed about 140 civilians and brought that colonel into the headlines of German papers. The investigation of that incident, conducted by a parliamentary commission in Germany, lasted two years and brought about much criticism for the devastating German-U.S. cooperation.
Now, in 2013, legal proceedings against the German Federal Republic are under way, initiated by relatives of the Afghan victims and who are demanding a compensation amounting to more than three million Euro (source: Die Zeit online, December 28, 2012).
Same questionable cooperation could have been at the root of the actual spy scandal, including an inoffical data swapping between allied administrations of different countries. I could imagine that U.S. President Obama originally didn't know about NSA running out of control. At some moment in the past, however, it must have come to his attention, and all he could hope then was that it never came to light.
By the way, an informal cooperation between intelligence agencies is known to exist between the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It is known under the name of "Five-Eyes-Club" and has attracted the interest of French and German intelligence officials as well who allegedly asked to participate, though without success up to now (source: Tagesschau, German TV news, 1st national channel, on October 29, 2013).
The damage caused by the NSA spy initiative, however, has immediately created a climate of mistrust between long-standing partners and allies and might lead to the postponement of free trade negociations as has been demanded by some high-ranking German politicians.
America's "intelligence organ" out of control and a global threat.
- Obama might become [its] victim. -
Oct. 26: America counted one thousand protesters in Washington
and who were opposing the plannings of a large-scale monitoring.
[Protesters praising the whistleblower who made it all known.]
[Source: People's Network - Global Times 人民网—全球时报 on October 28, 2013]
Related news on October 29:
评论：美国如何因一起爆炸案而走向“监控帝国”
How can America proceed on its way to a "supervizing and controlling empire" in the light of all those explosive cases ?
The article is referring to a U.S. website named "Foreign Policy" that begins with a historic suicide attack directed against U.S. troops to explain the course of development which transferred North-America into a "supervizing and controlling empire". The following two headlines are preceding the main text:
Intelligence work doesn't give power.
搭上两百条人命
Affecting 200 human lives.
From "mutual sharing of resources" to a "supervizing and controlling empire".
[Source: China News 中新网 on October 30, 2013]
That's how the registration of a visit from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is looking. I detected it in my visitor statistics for September 2013. The digits neighbouring their web address are telling us how many bytes were sent to them:
A visit to "blueprint news" from FBI Criminal Justice Information Systems has been detected on September 10, 2013. It comes from Clarksburg, West Virginia, where the FBI is using an extended area for the installation of its state-of-the-art high-tech information system:
Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree
Mysterious tune related to a scene from George Orwell's "1984",
a dark perception of some totalitarian state exerting total control
over its citizens, its adage being: "Big Brother is watching you!"
The reminder of a curious event, copied from another blogspot of mine.
It's about NSA probably hiding behind the U.S. Department of Justice:
Here comes one of my most reliable visitors who usually appears only minutes after I posted my latest blogspot. I presume that Lockheed Information Technology Company is providing services for other interested parties whoever they might be, as I could not image that aircraft manufacturer Lockheed Martin might have such strong interest in each and every subject of "blueprint news". They are using a Rippers browser ideal for "information mining", an expression introduced by some Israeli software provider many years ago and who tried to sell a related software product:
Choice of visitors to "blueprint news" in October 2013 and who could be located by a country tag in their webaddress:
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