New documents provided by Snowden/Greenwald show the elite of nations collaborating with the NSA.
- The “five spying eyes” are the well known inner circle of USA, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zeeland, based on the UKUSA agreement.
- First level friends are Denmark, Netherlands, Norway and France. Together with the inner circle we have to talk about “The 9 spying eyes”.
- Second level friends are Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Sweden. (It is little bit strange to call Sweden a second level friend, because the FRA is spying for the NATO. 70% of international Internet traffic of Russia is routed over Sweden and scanned by FRA for spying purposes in cooperation with NSA.)
- Third level friends are all cooperating intelligence services in Middle East and Afghanistan, 41 countries at all.
Germany has long protested at its exclusion from 9-Eyes and were a little grumpy at not being invited to join the group. Now, using the scandal following the disclosure of Merkels phone tap, the German intelligence service want to became a part of the inner circle. Official it is called “No-spy-agreement”, but such an agreement covered by a second secret cooperation agreement forms the basis for entering the inner circle. The partners of the inner circle have to collect large scale of information, pre-processing and send relevant results to the NSA/GCHQ data pool. In this case NSA and GCHQ may stop or reduce the spying in Germany.
Some German politicians are ready to go this way. By an internal paper of CDU/CSU (link only in German) the surveillance of Internet should be extended in NSA-style. German intelligence services should be improved to watch directly at Internet exchange nodes like DE-CIX.
from here