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May 22nd, 2015 
David Schulberg 
Former monitoring base of the US intelligence organization National Security Agency (NSA) in Bad Aibling south of Munich, Germany (Reuters)
The German Intelligence Agency chief says Berlin is dependent on the NSA, not vice versa, as US presence is vital to protect the country. Gerhard Schindler even laid the blame on his own organization for allowing the NSA to spy on European companies.
Schindler, the head of the German Intelligence Agency (BND), was
speaking at a special parliamentary committee on Thursday. He
acknowledged his organization had made mistakes when handling
requests from the National Security Agency, but added that
Germany would be a worse place without them.
“We are dependent on the NSA, not the other way round,”
the spy chief said, as quoted by Der Spiegel, adding that without
the NSA’s presence on German soil, the BND would be rendered
useless.
“Without this cooperation we wouldn’t be able to carry out
our work,” he said.
#BND-Chef
Schindler fürchtet um Zukunft des Geheimdienstes http://t.co/7Jvq3X4P9l pic.twitter.com/gPHfXffveI
— SPIEGEL ONLINE (@SPIEGELONLINE) May
22, 2015
Schindler said the German agency made a mistake by failing to
check the list of search criteria or selectors that the NSA had
asked it to use for surveillance activities. The selectors
included data such as names, IP addresses, telephone numbers and
email addresses.
The searches were conducted from the BND’s facility in Bad
Aibling, which was normally used to gather data come from places
such as Afghanistan or Somalia. However, it was recently
discovered that some of the search criteria the NSA asked for
were used to spy on some top European companies, such as
Eurocopter, and the European aviation consortium Airbus.
READ MORE: Germany provides NSA with staggering 1.3bn
pieces of metadata per month – report
The German spy chief added that the BND had failed to carry out a
comprehensive check of the search criteria and had only
previously only undertaken spot checks. The thorough inspections
only started in 2013, after Schindler had joined the intelligence
agency in 2012.
“These developments cause me great worry, as they will
ultimately call into question the ability of this service to
function in the future,” he told lawmakers, Deutsche Welle
reported. “We cannot do our job without international
cooperation.”
In April, Zeit Online revealed that the NSA had sent about
800,000 pieces of information to the BND headquarters in Pullach
for them to research. Several times a day, the BND would download
the NSA “selectors” into their monitoring system and
would use them to spy on targets. This took place over a 10-year
period.
Schindler claimed that he only found out about some of the more
troubling things his agency was asked to search for by the NSA in
March. He said this was caused by a lack of communication between
German intelligence across the country – again absolving the NSA
of any blame.
The spying scandal has not gone down well with the German public,
with one-third feeling deceived by Angela Merkel regarding
allegations that the BND assisted the NSA to spy on Germany.
Intense media interest ahead of German parliamentary hearing on
#NSA and
#BND
spying. BND chief Schindler testifying. pic.twitter.com/qnSuiVC1UE
— Frank Jordans (@wirereporter) May
21, 2015
A recent poll by the Berlin-based company Forsa said that over
half of Germans believed that the spying row was either
“important or very important.”
READ MORE: German intelligence halts internet
surveillance for NSA – reports
The BND dramatically reduced its cooperation with the NSA on May
4 in the wake of the scandals. Berlin had demanded that the US
spy agency first file an official request explaining the need for
the internet-based data from the Bad Aibling listening post in
Bavaria, where 120 BND employees and some NSA technicians work,
according to reports.
The BND will still continue to garner telephone calls and fax
messages for Washington as this service falls under a different
agreement.
A Green party member, Konstantin von Notz, told ARD television
that the decision to stop cooperation was “a drastic step.”
“I think they’ve pulled the emergency brake because, even in
2015, they still can’t control the search terms for Internet
traffic,” von Notz said.
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‘German intelligence dependent on NSA’ – Berlin’s spy chief
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