German Elections: Germany expects Russian leaking to start in 'weeks' - by Andrew Rettman

Germany expects Russia to start publishing compromising material on German MPs in the summer in order to destabilise elections in September.

Its interior minister, Thomas de Maiziere, and spy chief, Hans-Georg Maassen, issued the warning in Berlin on Tuesday (4 July) after unveiling a yearly intelligence report.

De Maiziere said the material “could be published in the coming weeks,” the Reuters news agency reported.

Maassen said Russia’s intention was “to damage trust in and the functioning of our democracy so our government should have domestic political difficulties and not be as free to act in its foreign policy as it is today.

A hacker group, called APT28, said by US intelligence to be a front for Russian spies, stole 16 gigabytes of data from over 5,600 computers in the German parliament in 2015.

It broke into the accounts of 16 MPs and some in chancellor Angela Merkel’s office.

Recalling Russia’s actions in the US and French elections, De Maiziere said he expected "a classic disinformation campaign with lies and half truths intended to shape opinions" that would be spread online by "bots”.

Mainstream parties are polling miles ahead of pro-Kremlin competitors, the Die Linke (The Left) party and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

The German voting system is also hard to hack. People vote on paper ballots and data is counted on an encrypted, offline network by the Federal Statistics Office.

But Germany hosts three pro-Kremlin media - RT Deutsch, Sputnik Deutsch, and NewsFront Deutsch.

The 2.5 million Russian people living in Germany also follow Russian state media, which has been broadcasting anti-Merkel propaganda for years.

Maassen, the intelligence chief, said on Tuesday: “It [Russia’s campaign] may not be aimed at strengthening one party or another, or ensuring that one or another person is elected to run the government, but that the trust in the functioning of our democracy is damaged.”

The yearly intelligence assessment by Germany’s domestic agency, the BfV, which handles counter-espionage, said Russia, Turkey, and China were its main adversaries. 

It said Turkey was spying on Turkish expats in Germany and China was trying to recruit agents on Facebook for economic espionage.    

Read more: Germany expects Russian leaking to start in 'weeks'

Spying: US versus China :"the Pot is calling the Kettle Black" as China to ditch US consulting firms for espionage

State-owned Chinese companies will cease to work with US consulting companies like McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group over fears they are spying on behalf of the US government.

US consulting companies McKinsey, BCG, Bain & Company, and Strategy&, formerly Booz & Co., will all be snubbed by state-owned Chinese companies, the Financial Times reported, citing sources close to senior Chinese leaders.

“The top leadership has proposed setting up a team of Chinese domestic consultants who are particularly focused on information systems in order to seize back this power from the foreign companies,” a senior policy adviser to the Chinese leadership was quoted by the FT as saying.

“Right now the foreigners use their consulting companies to find out everything they want about our state companies,” the adviser said.

McKinsey is the largest global consulting group operating in China, and about one-third of clients are state-owned enterprises. McKinsey has 650 employees in China.

Last Thursday China announced that all foreign companies would have to undergo a new security test. Any company, product or service that fails will be banned from China. The inspection will be conducted across all sectors - communications, finance, and energy.

China has already banned Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system from government computers, according to Chinese state media agency Xinhua.

“Under President Xi Jinping, technology and implementation will look to be converging, so foreign tech firms should be very worried about their prospects,” Bill Bishop, an independent consultant based in Beijing, told the FT.

Chinese officials have said that government ministries, companies, universities, and telecoms networks are victims of US hacking, and will try to avoid using US technology in order to protect “public interest”.

Read more: China to ditch US consulting firms over suspected espionage — RT Business

NSA Spying on Europeans: Specter of US spying looms large in Germany

NSA is always present

When the German version of the FBI needs to share sensitive information these days, it types it up and has it hand-delivered.

This time last year, it would have trusted in the security of email. But last year was before Edward Snowden and the public revelations of the scope of the National Security Agency's PRISM electronic intelligence-gathering program. After Snowden, or post-PRISM, is a new digital world.

"We're now carrying our information to our allies on foot," said Peter Henzler, the vice president of the Bundeskriminalamt, known as the BKA. He was speaking recently at a German Interior Ministry panel on the country's digital future. The focus of the panel was how to counter U.S. surveillance measures and what it will take for Germans to be safe again on the Web. "We're no longer using the open Internet."

The message is clear: The United States no longer can be trusted not to spy on any and every facet of German life and policy. Henzler's concerns might sound extreme, but he was hardly alone on his panel, and the worries appear to be an accurate reflection of the wider German, and even European, concern about the reach of the NSA's surveillance program.

Hardly a week passes here without some new revelation about the dastardly depths to which the American spy program invaded German privacy, or at least a new way in which to react to the scandal.

Last week, for instance, the news broke that the United States had tapped the cellphone of Gerhard Schroeder when he was the German chancellor from 1998 to 2005. Given that it's been four months since news broke that the same American surveillance program was tapping the cellphone of the current chancellor, Angela Merkel, and had been tapping her phone for several years before she was chancellor, the revelation could hardly have been surprising.

Merkel, after all, was seen as an American ally. Schroeder, who sharply criticized U.S. intentions and efforts in Iraq and was visibly uncomfortable in the presence of then-President George W. Bush, was seen as something less than an American booster.

But there are many more examples, beyond the news stories: Thirty-two percent of Germans tell pollsters they've either left or reduced their time on Facebook for fear of spying. German television ads note the peace of mind and freedom that come with email that doesn't leave European servers. Providers very publicly say that they now encrypt all email. Anti-surveillance NSA protests are common in Berlin.

Such thoughts aren't limited to Germany. A $900 million French deal with the United Arab Emirates for two new intelligence satellites appears to be in doubt after the buyers noticed U.S. components in the French satellites that they feared could compromise their data.

Florian Glatzner, a policy officer with the German Federal Consumer Protection Agency, said they were fielding a lot of consumer questions about how to ensure that their communications and data were safe from the electronic spying of the NSA.

"A lot of the trust in the big Internet companies is gone," he said. "And most of the big Internet companies were based in the United States."

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