Germany’s Spies Grab 11 Billion Pieces Of Phone Metadata A Year — And Pass On 6 Billion To The NSA

Glyn Moody reports:

Given Germany’s high-profile attachment to privacy, it’s always interesting to hear about ways in which its spies have been ignoring that tradition. Here, for example, is a story in the German newspaper Die Zeit about the country’s foreign intelligence agency BND gathering metadata from millions of phone records every day:

Zeit Online has learned from secret BND documents that five agency locations are involved in gathering huge amounts of metadata. Metadata vacuumed up across the world — 220 million pieces of it every single day — flows into BND branch offices in the German towns of Schöningen, Reinhausen, Bad Aibling and Gablingen. There, they are stored for between a week and six months and sorted according to still-unknown criteria.