Eight months after the nation's chancellor accused China of information attacks, Germany now faces criticism over its intelligence agency's use of software designed to spy on other countries' officials.
The latest incident, which began in June 2006, involved Germany's intelligence agency -- the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) -- launching an information attack against the Ministry of Commerce and Industry of Afghanistan, ostensibly an ally, according to media reports. Using a Trojan horse, the intelligence agents were able to read an Afghan government official's e-mail, including his correspondence with a reporter working for the German news magazine Der Spiegel, and data stored on the compromised PC's hard drive. The German Constitution protects the secrecy of telecommunications, but BND's legal counsel concluded that, because the messages were stored communications, they did not fall under the constitutional protection, Der Spiegel reported.
The operation ended on November 2006, when a whistleblower sent a letter to his superiors warning of the surveillance, the magazine reported. In February 2008, an anonymous BND employee notified two members of Germany's parliament of the intelligence agency's wiretapping activities. The incident only recently came to light during a Parliament hearing two weeks ago.
German's Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble raised the specter of terrorism during a TV interview to defend the cyber-espionage tactics as necessary. "It's about a few isolated cases," he said, according to an Associated Press report.
The revelations that German intelligence stole information from another country using malicious code is the latest incident of national spying. In November, Germany accused Chinese intelligence officials of spying on its government computer systems. In the United States, the government agency responsible for spying on other countries -- and defending American communications against eavesdropping -- remains accused of wiretapping communications between U.S. citizens and foreign terrorism suspects. And this week, four private investigators in Israel were sentenced to prison for their role in using Trojan horse programs to spy on clients' rivals.
In a previous controversial incident in Germany, BND agents used a Trojan horse to compromise computers of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, aiming to gather information to help German peacekeepers stationed in the troubled nation.
Der Spiegel is considering filing a lawsuit against the intelligence agency, the magazine stated in its coverage of the incident.
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