Per SPIEGEL: Snowden showed Spiegel documents that could endanger NSA lives.

[leveymg]

6. NSA_doesn't_run_human_intel_or_covert_agents._It_only_has_liaison_officers_w/_allied_services.

Last edited Mon Jul 15, 2013, 02:57 PM - Edit history (1)

both U.S. agencies and foreign. The joint-collection relationship with foreign intelligence services is described in the excerpt below. It is in fact the CIA that runs networks of foreign agents (HUMINT) in countries around the world, while the NSA provides technical assistance through a little-known agency, the Special Collections Service (SCS), which is described in my post downthread.

The NSA and foreign intel services collect each others mail, so to speak, an arrangement that goes back decades to the ECHELON "Five Eyes" system:

But the new aspect of the revelations isn't that countries are trying to spy on each other, eavesdropping on ministers and conducting economic espionage. What is most important about the documents is that they reveal the possibility of the absolute surveillance of a country's people and foreign citizens without any kind of effective controls or supervision. Among the intelligence agencies in the Western world, there appears to be a division of duties and at times extensive cooperation. And it appears that the principle that foreign intelligence agencies do not monitor the citizens of their own country, or that they only do so on the basis of individual court decisions, is obsolete in this world of globalized communication and surveillance. Britain's GCHQ intelligence agency can spy on anyone but British nationals, the NSA can conduct surveillance on anyone but Americans, and Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency can spy on anyone but Germans. That's how a matrix is created of boundless surveillance in which each partner aids in a division of roles.

The documents show that, in this situation, the services did what is not only obvious, but also anchored in German law: They exchanged information. And they worked together extensively. That applies to the British and the Americans, but also to the BND, which assists the NSA in its Internet surveillance.