Germany’s Foreign Intelligence Agency (BND), in an effort to come clean in these compromised post-Snowden times, has revealed that a number of mysterious facilities dotting Germany are in fact used as spy stations.
Strike one in the victory column for the conspiracy theorists.
After many years of denying it had any connection with
organizations such as the Ionosphere Institute, and snubbing
website “conspiracy” claims to the contrary, the BND admitted the
mysterious complexes were in fact poorly concealed surveillance
stations.
One of the facilities, previously known as the Telecommunications
Traffic Office of the German Armed Forces, in Bad Aibling, near
Munich, had its hitherto secret identity betrayed by massive golf
ball-shaped radomes on its lawn.
The German intelligence-gathering agency held a ceremony at the
complex on Friday to unveil a brass nameplate declaring its real
purpose.
BND chief Gerhard Schindler admitted it was time to give up the
ruse.
“It makes no sense, to give a simple example, that external
sites of the BND are run with covert names if the fact that they
belong to the BND can be read on the internet,” Schindler
acknowledged recently.
“If there’s one thing that the man on the street will
remember from the whole NSA debate in Germany, it’s that the
satellite ground stations in Bad Aibling belong to the BND,”
he added.
The six spy facilities are officially linked to the agency’s
signals intelligence work —which eavesdrops on radio, data and
phone traffic.
Friday was a busy day for the spy agencies, as Vodaphone, the
world’s second largest mobile phone company, admitted it had
allowed the intelligence agencies from almost 30 countries the
power to listen in on customer conversations.
The UK-based company released on the same day a 40,000-word Law
Enforcement Disclosure Report, which has been labeled “the
most comprehensive survey yet of how governments monitor the
conversations and whereabouts of their people,” the Guardian
reported.