14 DAY TRIAL // Apparently, the NSA surveillance practices in Germany include the collection of 500 million communications connections each month.
According to Der Spiegel, who cites documents revealed by Edward Snowden, the information collected includes phone calls, emails and chat logs.
This means that the NSA had been directly spying on German citizens constantly for some time now.
The scale of the collection is particularly significant when you compare it with the number of citizens the country has. With about 80 million citizens, the NSA had collected 60 million communication connections in a single day back in January.
The NSA is also more active in Germany than in any other country that is part of the European Union. For instance, in France it only collects about 2 million connections each day.
Despite the fact that Germany and the United States are known partners, the country is not excluded from the spying practices.
According to the same document, the only countries explicitly excluded from spying attacks are Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
Regarding the latter, the UK was also revealed to have a similar surveillance program that it used to tap into the NSA data collections, called Tempora. Germany has already demanded information about the reach of the British program.
A little over three weeks ago, it was revealed that the NSA had been running a covert spying program that concerns the entire population of the globe with access to the Internet.
The NSA programs regarded collection of phone call metadata, but also of private data from various tech companies, such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Apple, to name just a few.
While these giant companies have denied involvement, the government officials didn’t even bother to deny these claims and started instead to defend the programs, claiming that they had been used to deter terrorist attacks.