`Fox IT found Regin on the computers of one of its customers, and according to their analysis parts of Regin are mentioned in the NSA ANT catalog under the names "Straitbizarre" and "Unitedrake".`
Because the US shares intelligence with those governments. In some EU countries it is illegal for the government to spy on its citizens (also see the US pre-9/11), so the US spies on those countries and then relays the info back.
Pre-9/11 this is also how the US worked. The UK spied on the US and the US spied on the UK, thus both subverting national laws, they then shared intelligence with one another (which is legal) and thus the loophole was born.
This is actually the system the US is going back to, it is becoming politically unpopular for the NSA to spy on American Citizens, so GCHQ will likely take over the majority again, the reasons they couldn't after 9/11 was that the workload increase too much in too short a period, and the systems didn't yet exist.
This goes all the way back to ECHELON and Five Eyes. If you look up the ECHELON program, you will find documented evidence of exactly that occurring. There is evidence this and similar programs/agreements has been going on since at least WWII.
Even now, it's well-documented and well-understood that all the first-world allied nations have varying degrees of intelligence-sharing relationships with their SIGINT programs. For example, with the NSA, you have the Five Eyes countries, and also Tier 2 countries like Germany.
I tihnk what also holds them back a little is also the fact it's amazingly hypocritical for them to complain too much, because every industrialized country is spying on every other industrialized country, allied or not. Of course, some are bigger targets than others. The US is obviously the biggest target, but there's smaller scale stuff going on too, as between France and Germany. According to Germany, France is the "evil empire" of industrial espionage perpetrated in part through their SIGINT programs.
The focus on the USA, and the NSA, is misleading. The NSA's role is probably comparable to the US government at large's role in world politics, (biggest, most influential) but all other nations are complicit. I don't intend to sound mean, but I feel like the attitude that so many people had in the wake of the Snowden revelations, that spying on allies was unheard of, unexpected, evil, is breathtakingly naive and historically and contextually unaware, and almost like some kind of twisted expression of the stereotypical American arrogance, that only Americans could commit so great an evil. This is an old, old, old game that has always evolved with technology.
There's nothing conspiratorial about that one. Look up the echelon network and the UKUSA Agreement (both on Wikipedia). It has also been talked about in several books on the topic and discussed openly in the press. It is almost an "open secret" at this point.
Heck you can almost read the above claims verbatim here:
> During the 2013 NSA leaks Internet spying scandal, the surveillance agencies of the "Five Eyes" have been accused of intentionally spying on one another's citizens and willingly sharing the collected information with each other, allegedly circumventing laws preventing each agency from spying on its own citizens
Maybe, but I'm 99.99% sure that wasn't the person above's implication by suggesting it was "just" a conspiracy theory. If it had have been their entire point would be redundant, instead it is likely they were trying to suggest it was a fiction or born out of paranoia.
I wouldn't go so far as to call it a "fact" but based on several leaks, books, and news sources it is likely more fact than fiction.
By the way, my understanding is that it was never as simple as two countries colluding to share raw data with each other; there had to be essentially a "laundering" of the data by turning it into analyzed intelligence, so that an NSA analyst couldn't just explicitly task a selector on a US-resident AMCIT via another FVEY partner.
If you think about it from the lawyers' perspective, it goes something like this:
I(a)) A can gather data on BCITs.
I(b)) A cannot gather data or cause data to be gathered on ACITs.
II(a)) B can gather data on ACITs.
II(b)) B cannot gather data or cause data to be gathered on BCITs.
III) Data gathered via (I(a)) or (II(a)) is lawfully collected.
IV) Lawfully-collected data may be turned into intelligence.
V) A and B can share intelligence that is gathered by lawful means.
Therefore, A can receive intelligence on ACITs and B can receive intelligence on BCITs, so long as they do not derive that intelligence by gathering data or causing data to be gathered on their own citizens.
Now, this was pre-9/11; after that, who knows what gloves came off?
Google "Five Eyes". The Wikipedia article has a bunch of sources to this particular issue in recent times.
Also, IIRC this has been talked about for a long time... I'm pretty sure I read about this practice initially in the 80s/90s, probably in reference to Libyan sponsored terrorism in Europe.
Yes, it has, see [0], [1]. But there are fairly simple reasons why Europe does not close those stations, namely because European nations (including Germany) are doing similar things on their own [2],[3],[4] and also together with the Americans [5], and they generally think it's good that way.
Another point is that enforcing closure of such stations is rather difficult. You can limit these activities by making noise in the public and declaring diplomats persona non grata, but such things come with a diplomatic price.
BTW, your question reminds me of the activities of Интернет исследовательское агентство. According to reports, they like to raise this kind of points, though sometimes more more aggressively (hence the name "troll army").
`Der Spiegel reported in November 2014.......`
`Fox IT found Regin on the computers of one of its customers, and according to their analysis parts of Regin are mentioned in the NSA ANT catalog under the names "Straitbizarre" and "Unitedrake".`