Americans and Germans Tapped Conversations in BiH

The American intelligence agency NSA, with the help of the German intelligence service BND and the German telecommunications operator Deutsche Telekom, tested an operation from 2005 to 2008 to tap telephone conversations as part of a secret operation Eikonal, whose goal was to analyze and filter the content of civilian telephone conversations due to the danger of terrorism. Conversations from Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and BiH were also checked, reports the Patria News Agency.

This was stated on Thursday in a special broadcast by the Slovenian television station POP-TV by Peter Pilz, a member of the Green Party in the Austrian parliament, who also presented the so-called "yellow list" obtained through his channels, which is alleged proof that ordinary citizens were also tapped.

The "yellow list," a list compiled by the NSA in 2005, included 256 telephone lines designated for tapping, Pilz said.

He added that, among others, three telephone lines from Slovenia to foreign countries were monitored, as well as international telephone calls from Croatia, Serbia, and BiH.

The authors of the broadcast on Slovenian television claim that the "yellow list" will cause a lot of controversy in the region, including in Croatia, where four international telephone lines were monitored in the Eikonal operation, those going from Zagreb to Rotterdam, Stockholm, Kista (Sweden), and Brussels.

According to Pilz, only Estonia, Lithuania, and Malta were uninteresting for tapping by the Americans in Europe, and all conversations monitored in Europe were analyzed and filtered to search for intelligence data, looking for characteristic words such as "terrorism," "bomb," and the like.

Allegedly, American intelligence was also interested in the personal data of some individuals, as well as their telephone, bank, and tax numbers.

The Austrian Green Party representative stated that the Americans were interested in determining how much data about the civilian population could be collected in the operation and what could be concluded from that data about potential terrorist threats.

Telephone conversations were rerouted to Frankfurt with the help of the Germans, where they were copied, and then sent to Pullach, the headquarters of the German intelligence service BND.

Finally, they ended up in Aibling, where people from the American agency analyzed all the calls, claim the broadcast authors.

In Telekom Slovenije, in their comment for the broadcast, they stated that they are not familiar with the operation Pilz spoke about, but that they generally cannot guarantee the secrecy of conversations in international traffic to their clients.

A former member of the Slovenian intelligence community from the time when the Eikonal operation took place said that he had never heard of it, but that the revelations about tapping did not surprise him.

Let us recall, the American NSA was the main actor in a scandal of enormous proportions that broke out in 2013. At that time, American computer scientist Edward Snowden (31), a former employee of the NSA, the National Security Agency, revealed details of several American mass surveillance programs. He was subsequently accused of espionage and now lives in exile in Russia, writes Hina.