Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND, and its domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), used a spying program of the American National Security Agency (NSA). This is evident in secret documents from the US intelligence service that have been seen by SPIEGEL journalists. The documents show that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution was equipped with a program called XKeyScore intended to "expand their ability to support NSA as we jointly prosecute CT (counterterrorism) targets." The BND is tasked with instructing the domestic intelligence agency on how to use the program, the documents say. 
 
 According to an internal NSA presentation from 2008, the program is a productive espionage tool. Starting with the metadata -- or information about which data connections were made and when -- it is able, for instance, to retroactively reveal any terms the target person has typed into a search engine, the documents show. In addition, the system is able to receive a "full take" of all unfiltered data over a period of several days -- including, at least in part, the content of communications. 
 
 This is relevant from a German perspective, because the documents show that of the up to 500 million data connections from Germany accessed monthly by the NSA, a major part is collected with XKeyScore (for instance, around 180 million in December 2012). The BND and BfV, when contacted by SPIEGEL, would not discuss the espionage tool. The NSA, as well, declined to comment, referring instead to the words of US President Barack Obama during his visit to Berlin and saying there was nothing to add. 
 
 'Eagerness and Desire' 
 
 Furthermore, the documents show that the cooperation of the German intelligence agencies with the NSA has recently intensified. Reference is made to the "eagerness and desire" of BND head Gerhard Schindler. "The BND has been working to influence the German government to relax interpretation of the privacy laws to provide greater opportunities of intelligence sharing," the NSA noted in January. Over the course of 2012, German partners had shown a "willingness to take risks and to pursue new opportunities for cooperation with the US." 
 
 In Afghanistan, it says elsewhere in the document, the BND had even proved to be the NSA's "most prolific partner" when it came to information gathering. The relationship is also close on a personal level: At the end of April, just a few weeks before the first revelations by former intelligence agency employee Edward Snowden, a 12-member high-level BND delegation was invited to the NSA to meet with various specialists on the subject of "data acquisition." ||||| BERLIN — Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany had hoped to focus her re-election campaign on domestic priorities like energy and health care, but revelations of far-reaching American surveillance programs and persistent questions about whether they may have violated the rights of German citizens continue to intrude. 
 
 For the second time in little more than a week, Ms. Merkel, 58, publicly addressed questions Friday about the extent to which the United States might have listened in on Germans’ telephone calls and monitored their Internet communications. “We are examining what happened, whether this is the tip of the iceberg, or less serious, or something else — what is true,” she said in response to reporters’ questions at her annual news conference before breaking for summer vacation. 
 
 Although Ms. Merkel, who is seeking a third term, and her center-right Christian Democratic Union maintain a comfortable lead in polls in advance of the presidential election in September, the scandal appears for the first time to be chipping away at Germans’ confidence in her leadership. More than two-thirds of Germans said they were dissatisfied with her government’s attempts to answer allegations that the United States used its massive surveillance program to spy on Germans, a survey by Infratest Dimap for the ARD public network showed. 
 
 “I am the head of government, and consequently, I have to make sure that here in our country German law has been upheld,” Ms. Merkel told reporters, making a fist to drive home her point. “In Germany, as in Europe, the right of the powerful does not override the power of the law.” 
 
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 At the same time, Ms. Merkel warned that no government could guarantee its citizens’ rights beyond national borders, a problem brought to light by Edward J. Snowden, a former contractor for the United States National Security Agency, who revealed the agency’s surveillance of virtually all telephone calls to the United States from Germany and of e-mails of foreigners using major American Internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and Skype.
– Barack Obama isn't the only world leader suffering over leaked information about NSA surveillance—Germany's Angela Merkel is also in the firing line. On Friday, she spent her annual news conference dealing with increasing concerns that the US has been spying on German citizens, the New York Times reports. "We are examining what happened, whether this is the tip of the iceberg, or less serious, or something else—what is true," she said. But a new report from Der Spiegel says Germany should have some idea of what's true, because it is running NSA spying programs and has actually been increasing its cooperation with US intelligence recently. Der Spiegel says it has seen secret US documents showing German intelligence is employing the NSA's XKeyScore program. XKeyScore allows the agencies to gather all unfiltered data coming from a target's computer for several days, including things like what they have typed into search engines and the content of communications. The NSA accesses up to 500 million data connections from Germany a month. In December 2012 alone, 180 million of those came from XKeyScore. The documents also report that Germany's foreign intelligence service has recently "been working to influence the German government to relax interpretation of the privacy laws to provide greater opportunities of intelligence sharing" and has become the NSA's "most prolific partner" for intelligence gathering in Afghanistan.