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Credits
Title of the original German edition: Des Königs NSA. 1684 statt 1984.
© 2016 Thomas Hillenbrand, tomhillenbrand.de
All rights reserved
Prinn & Junzt, www.prinnjunzt.com
Design: wppt:kommunikation gmbh Süleyman Kayaalp, Beatrix Göge, wppt.de
Cover illustration: portrait of Jean-Baptiste Colbert by Philippe de Champaigne (1655)
Translation: Alison Gallup
Contents
Credits
Contents
The Eavesdroppers of Frankfurt
Establishing a Surveillance State
Letter Transport and Postal Services
The Black Chambers
Early Defense Strategies
Counter-Strategies
Impact
The End of the Chambers
Today
Bibliography
The Book
The Author
The Eavesdroppers of Frankfurt
On Gutleutstrasse, not far from Frankfurt’s main train station, there is a plain, corrugated metal warehouse. It has no windows; it has no company name. A passageway connects it with the adjacent office building, number 310, a structure that has also seen better days. There is no indication whatsoever of the enormous amounts of information being processed at this location – for this complex of buildings is home to servers that form part of DE-CIX, the largest internet exchange point in the world. All in all, approximately four terabytes of data race through the various Frankfurt DE-CIX data centers per second. That’s equivalent to two billion typed pages. Hundreds of organizations from more than sixty countries are connected to DE-CIX, including nearly every major internet service provider. A substantial portion of global communication and data traffic passes through Frankfurt. While the data hurtles through the city’s center, there are some who are keeping their fingers firmly on the pulse of the data flow. The NSA scandal unleashed by Edward Snowden revealed that both the largest U.S. intelligence organization and its British counterpart, GCHQ, are constantly trying to tap key exchange points in an effort to gain access to all the world’s data traffic. DE-CIX, too, has been hit – its Frankfurt hub, after all, makes for a pretty good haul of information; indeed, it’s hard to imagine a better one. In 2015, Klaus Landefeld, who sits on the advisory board of DE-CIX Management GmbH, told the German parliamentary committee investigating the surveillance activities of the NSA that the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, had been tapping the Frankfurt exchange point and siphoning off information of interest since 2009. The BND then passes on what it collects to the Americans, and to others as well.
It may seem odd that the center of twenty-first century mass surveillance is situated in Frankfurt of all places. A look back in history reveals, however, that we’ve always been tracked and spied on – and that this particular German metropolis on the Main River has consistently played a key role.
Frankfurt has a long tradition when it comes to surveillance. In the 1960s, the telecommunications tower on Eschenheimer Landstrasse near the Zeil, Frankfurt’s busiest shopping street, was the convergence point for all incoming and outgoing telephone connections with foreign countries. There were no technical reasons whatsoever for the Bundespost (German Federal Post Office) – the state-run operation in charge of this – to channel all German long-distance calls through this building. Even back then, the lines were aggregated probably for the sole purpose of making it easier to listen in on conversations. And who was doing this? Mostly the National Security Agency. The NSA occupied several floors of the telecommunications tower and had a direct connection, via shielded dedicated lines, to the Bundespost’s switching center.
But we can go back much further. Frankfurt was also a regional intelligence center in the nineteenth, eighteenth, and even the seventeenth century – with a focus not on digital data or telephone conversations, of course, but on letters. In fact, the above-mentioned telecommunications tower was erected on the precise location where the Palais Thurn und Taxis, the palace of the house of Thurn und Taxis, once stood. Since 1501, this noble family had provided the capitaine et maistre de nos postes, later called the Kaiserlicher Hauptpostmeister (Imperial Chief Postmaster), for the Holy Roman Empire. So, even way back then Frankfurt was an information hub. Letters arriving here, and in other towns and cities, were opened and read in Frankfurt – and with a comprehensiveness that we find astounding today. As we consider the history of mass surveillance in what follows, it will become abundantly clear that organized spying on the general public has a much longer tradition than most of us are likely to be aware of. To some degree, the nightmare described by Orwell in 1984 was already happening in 1684.
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