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"Hand over the data!"
, the country's data protection commissioner said in a leaked report, which also unveiled
excessive and systematic violations of citizens' rights by the spy agency. The paper examined how the BND data collection center in the southeastern city of Bad Aibling
monitored the telecommunications data of German citizens. The 60-page report was initially obtained by NDR and WDR media outlets and was also posted online by the netzpolitik.org website.
In the leaked document, dating back to March 2016, Federal Data Protection Commissioner Andrea Vosshoff claimed the BND clearly hampered her attempts to investigate the agency's work. "The BND has illegally and massively restricted my supervision authority on several occasions. A comprehensive and efficient control was not possible [...] these are grave legal infringements,"Vosshoff stated.
She noted that the intelligence service
specifically impeded on her attempts to investigate so-called
'selector' lists of keywords used by BND to search for and identify information relevant to a certain case from
databases and data flows. These include phone numbers, emails, chats, content from public social media, messages in web forums, geographic coordinates, keywords etc. According to Vosshoff, who is responsible for monitoring the activities of government agencies with respect to citizen's rights on personal information, the
"BND has collected personal data without a legal basis und has processed it systematically."
The commissioner pinpointed
18 severe legal violations and filed 12 formal complaints in seven fields of the service's activity, detailing attempts to block her inquiries as one of them. Vosshoff went on to say in her report that despite BND's claims that the "information is essential" it cannot "substitute a missing legal basis".
The facility in Bad Aibling and the "selectors" scandal made headlines back in 2015, when it became apparent that
BND had been spying on European politicians and companies for America's NSA (National Security Agency) for over a decade. In exchange for data sharing, BND took the lists from the NSA and added them to their own monitoring system.
Comment: Bad enough that humans use, abuse and manipulate personal data on a global scale without legality, permission or lofty motives. Wait until sentient AI gets ahold of it! Game over. Completely over!