Exclusive: Germanys foreign intelligence agency BND has the capacity to gather 1,2 trillion connections per day at worlds largest internet exchange point. According to documents obtained by @derspiegel + @BR_Recherche spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzp…
Important: This is not the actual amount of data the agency saves to its data bases. BND emphasizes that number is around 150k communications daily (temporarily saved), which produce 260 actual human reports per day (permanently saved).
Between the data originally gathered and the data actually analyzed by humans is a multi-level filtering system. Filtering is done by IP-addresses, with currently +100k search terms (including binary codes), country codes for phone numbers, second level domains and more. 
We obtained 151 pages of internal technical and legal manuals + other docs. Here is the story by our collogues from @BR_Recherche. br.de/nachrichten/ne… Thanks for a great collab. We have a full story in this week’s print edition of @derspiegel (all german sorry)
One of the biggest challenges for BND is that it’s a foreign intel service, not allowed to do strategic surveillance domestically. Docs show an extensive system to ensure germans, children, lawyers, clerics, journos and other protected ppl are not surveilled accidentally.
This leads to some remarkably specific directives for BND agents:
- “I love you” in private convo? Can be recorded
- “Sexual boasting” in public conversation? also ok
- “Conversations solely about sexuality” must be deleted
More details here: spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzp…
- “I love you” in private convo? Can be recorded
- “Sexual boasting” in public conversation? also ok
- “Conversations solely about sexuality” must be deleted
More details here: spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzp…
Thanks for a great collab to the team @BR_Recherche and to all the colleagues involved @meyerar @maxzierer @piarennt @nierlev @schmidtwolf @MartinKnobbe @Frau_Horchert 🍻
