An agent at the BND, the German intelligence service, has been arrested on suspicion of spying for the US:
German detectives have arrested a man suspected of spying for the United States in what could prove the ‘biggest scandal involving a German-American double agent since the Second World War’.
The 31-year-old German citizen was being questioned today on suspicion of snooping on Germany’s parliamentary inquiry into the NSA affair.
According to one German newspaper, he was first arrested amid suspicions he tried to make contact with Russian intelligence, only to confess he was in fact spying for the Americans.………
The man has admitted passing to an American contact details about a special German parliamentary committee set up to investigate the spying revelations made by former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, two politicians, who asked to remain anonymous, said.
Both lawmakers are members of the nine-person parliamentary control committee, whose meetings are confidential, and which is in charge of monitoring German intelligence.
The parliamentary committee investigating the NSA affair also holds some confidential meetings.
(emphasis mine)
First, let me state the obvious: Allies spy on each other. It’s a fact of life.
In a properly run intelligence service, this tends to be low key, and it’s confined to items of direct security interests, things like divining the relationship with other states, basic positions in negotiations, potentially military technology, etc.
This is not this. This is the CIA/NSA/etc. spying on an official parliamentary inquiry because they are worried that the revelations might embarrass them personally.
This is stupid, and, as I have noted many times before, it is indicative of an intelligence apparatus that is completely out of control of either our defense and diplomatic establishment, to say nothing of the the President.
This is insane.
And finally, Glenn Greenwald comes very close to saying that the origins of this story has nothing to do with Edward Snowden, so there is necessarily a 2nd leaker as its source:
Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who has worked closely with exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden to reveal the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, says there may be a second leaker providing the NSA’s secrets to the press.
Two German media reports co-authored by former WikiLeaks volunteer and current Tor Project employee Jacob Appelbaum are the cause of his suspicion.
The first report was published in December by Der Spiegel and describes a 50-page catalog of NSA surveillance tools. The second came last week from the German broadcasters Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) and Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), detailing NSA surveillance of people who use Tor and other online privacy services.
Both articles “notably fail to mention anything about the sourcing for the documents,” Greenwald tells U.S. News. “That’s particularly notable given that virtually every other article using Snowden documents – including Der Spiegel – specifically identified him as the source.”
Bruce Schneier, a technology security expert who worked with Greenwald to evaluate the cache of documents Snowden leaked, offered similar speculation on his blog Thursday.
“I do not believe that this [information about Tor surveillance] came from the Snowden documents,” Schneier wrote. “I also don’t believe the TAO catalog came from the Snowden documents. I think there’s a second leaker out there.”
Seriously, this is a bureaucracy to run amok, and the fact that we have to rely on the kindness of leakers to provide any oversight scares the hell out of me.