German BfV - NSA Cooperation

The German newspaper Zeit is reporting the BfV, Germany's national intelligence agency, (probably) illegally traded data about Germans to the NSA in exchange for access to XKeyscore. From Ars Technica:

Unlike Germany's foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the domestic-oriented BfV does not employ bulk surveillance of the kind also deployed on a vast scale by the NSA and GCHQ. Instead, it is only allowed to monitor individual suspects in Germany and, even to do that, must obtain the approval of a special parliamentary commission. Because of this targeted approach, BfV surveillance is mainly intended to gather the content of specific conversations, whether in the form of e-mails, telephone exchanges, or even faxes, if anyone still uses them. Inevitably, though, metadata is also gathered, but as Die Zeit explains, "whether the collection of this [meta]data is consistent with the restrictions outlined in Germany's surveillance laws is a question that divides legal experts."

The BfV had no problems convincing itself that it was consistent with Germany's laws to collect metadata, but rarely bothered since­ -- remarkably­ -- all analysis was done by hand before 2013, even though metadata by its very nature lends itself to large-scale automated processing. This explains the eagerness of the BfV to obtain the NSA's XKeyscore software after German agents had seen its powerful metadata analysis capabilities in demonstrations.

It may also explain the massive expansion of the BfV that the leaked document published by Netzpolitik had revealed earlier this year. As Die Zeit notes, the classified budget plans "included the information that the BfV intended to create 75 new positions for the 'mass data analysis of Internet content.' Seventy-five new positions is a significant amount for any government agency."

Note that the documents this story is based on seem to have not been provided by Snowden.