Photo Gallery Berlin Develops Its Own Mini Prism
United States President Barack Obama (right) will be traveling to Germany this week to meet with Chancellor Angela Merkel. Revelations about the Americans' Prism spying program have outraged people around the world, but it is unlikely the German government will take Washington to task for spying on Germans' data.
The Prism program is operated by the National Security Agency. Pictured here is the NSA's headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.
This photo shows an NSA listening facility in Bad Aibling, Germany. The US has been accused of gathering information about German businesses through the station.
NSA head Keith Alexander: The world has learned that the US intelligence agency, with the help of direct access to the servers of US Internet giants, is able to secretly read, record and store nearly every type of digital communication worldwide. But outrage has been muted in Germany. It's playing big in the news, but few politicians have spoken out loudly against it. Chancellor Merkel's spokesman has merely described it as "irritating".
The news broke because of the release of documents to the Guardian newspaper by whistleblower Edward Snowden a former CIA employee. Snowden's leak raises important questions: How much surveillance of the Internet is a free society willing or able to tolerate?
Currently, Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND, is building its new headquarters in Berlin. At the same time, it is also expanding its own data-mining operations and creating a program that looks a lot like a smaller Prism.
BND head Gerhard Schinder wants the agency to invest 100 million euros over the next five years to expand the intelligence agency's ability to conduct Internet surveillance. It is one of the most ambitious modernization projects in the BND's history.
German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich (right) attends a session of parliament with Chancellor Merkel. "Of course our intelligence agencies also have to be present on the Internet," he recently said. "It is unacceptable that criminals are arming themselves technologically, using the Internet more and more efficiently -- and we, the state, can do nothing to stop them."
