Photo Gallery America's Data Dragnet
United States President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin: The questions that need to be addressed in the NSA scandal are serious. Can a sovereign state tolerate a situation whereby a half a billion pieces of data a month are stolen on its territory from a foreign country? A country which has been identified its target as a "third party" and, as has become clear, can be spied on at any time?
The National Security Agency's former monitoring base in Bad Aibling south of Munich was at the center of America's controversial Echelon program and alleged industrial espionage during the 1990s. The amount of monitoring that happened there seems modest compared to the current scandal.
The National Security Administration's headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, near Washington, DC. "Any analyst can target anyone anytime," whistleblower Edward Snowden warned in a video interview, and that includes a federal judge or the president, if an email address is available, he added.
US General Keith Alexander, head of the NSA: Since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the number of NSA employees has climbed continually and its budget has increased. In 2006, 15,986 members of the military and 19,335 civilians worked for the NSA. It had an annual budget of $6.115 billion. The NSA head is sometimes called "Emporer Alexander," one analyst notes. "Keith gets whatever he wants."
The facts shown in the documents leaked by Edward Snowden (shown here in a broadcast on a train in Hong Kong) disprove the White House's line of defense up until now, which has been that surveillance is necessary to prevent terrrorist atacks. At best that is only part of the truth. Documents reviewed by SPIEGEL show how overreaching US surveillance has been.
A protester in Hanover, Germany, holds up a sign on Saturday reading: "The United Stasi of America," a reference to the feared secret police in totalitarian East Germany. A second sign states: "Those with nothing to hide should not fear whistleblowers."
Large-scale surveillance: Phone and Internet data captured by the NSA's "Boundless Informant" program, in millions of datasets.
Glass conduits: Digital streams from high-bandwidth Internet cables that transport data equivalent to that held in Washington's Library of Congress around the world in the course of a few seconds.
