Germany "backs away" from claims NSA
program thwarted five terrorist attacks
Translation: 'We lied our asses off to protect the
NSA's unconstitutional spying programs.'
German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich is backing off his earlier assertion that the Obama administration’s NSA monitoring of Internet accounts had prevented five terror attacks in Germany, raising questions about other claims concerning the value of the massive monitoring programs revealed by NSA leaker Edward Snowden.
Friedrich had made the assertion about the number of attacks that the NSA programs – which scoop up records from cellphone and Internet accounts – had helped to avert after a brief visit to the United States last week.
But on Tuesday, he told a German parliamentary panel, “It is relatively difficult to count the number of terror attacks that didn’t occur.”
And on Wednesday, he was publicly referring to just two foiled attacks, at least one and possibly both of which appeared to have little to do with the NSA’s surveillance programs reports McClatchy News.
TRANSLATION - We just made up a bunch of shit for the press.
The questions about the programs’ value in thwarting attacks in Germany come as some members of the U.S. Congress have told Obama officials that the programs exceeded what Congress authorized when it passed laws that the administration is arguing allowed the collection of vast amounts of information on cellphone and Internet email accounts.
In Germany, the concern is that the NSA is capturing and storing as many as 500 million electronic communications each month, but Germans are getting little if anything back for what is seen as an immoral and illegal invasion of privacy. “German-American relations are at risk,” said Hans-Christian Stroebele, a member of the influential German intelligence oversight committee in the country’s legislature, the Bundestag.
“We’re lucky to have had Snowden,” Stroebele said. “Without him, this surveillance that is not permissible under international law would have continued for a long time. In Germany, there are prison terms for such spying.”
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