Intelligence officials in the U.S. and Britain can secretly get information from individual computers and smartphones in Germany, a leading German publication says, citing information from American leaker Edward Snowden.
Agencies such as the National Security Agency can glean data through German service providers such as Deutsche Telekom and Netcologne, the BBC said, citing a report in Der Spiegel.
The Der Spiegel report cited documents released by Snowden, the former U.S. intelligence contractor who has made extensive revelations about America’s electronic spying around the world.
“The access of foreign secret services to our network would be totally unacceptable,” Deutsche Telekom’s IT security head, Thomas Tschersich, told the newspaper, the BBC said.
The newspaper presented the head of the German telecom firm Stellar with a document from the British answer to the NSA that showed some Stellar clients’ passwords, AFP reported.
The German data taps are performed through a program called “Treasure Map,” the existence of which was reported on last fall by the New York Times. Der Spiegel likened it to a “Google Earth of the Internet,” plotting paths through computer networks to drill down to individual devices, the BBC said.
Many Germans have been angered by the revelations from Snowden and others that the NSA had tapped the phones of Germans, including Chancellor Angela Merkel.
