Oh, but Germany isn't part of the five eyes alliance. I think that's what hurt us the most. Our government really believed in a German/American alliance. And then we found out we didn't belong into the inner circle.

And now the politicians finally realized what it means to give a foreign power access to your internet nodes. Sure we need the cooperation, but my guess is the politicians and the executive organs could not imagine the NSA would use this to harm our economy.

fiveeyes is hardly a secret. It's existence isn't even classified. For example, I've sat in presentations with nationals from many countries, and the non-fiveeyes members would occassionally be asked to leave the room at the end to allow the fiveeyes nations to divulge some further information. But the other nations were told before leaving that the next part of the presentation was fiveeyes only.

German companies are very unhappy.

http://www.dw.de/airbus-to-press-charges-on-nsa-bnd-spying-c...

Airbus has both civilian and military development and production in Germany.

If I understand this correctly, Boeing (US) and Airbus (EU) are competing head to head for extremely valuable contracts. The NSA tasks the BND to spy on Airbus employees and the company in order to maintain Boeing's competitive edge over Airbus. In doing so, threatening the jobs of fellow Germans (and other Europeans).

Is that more or less what has been going on?

This is exactly whats going on, the NSA tried to get their selectors inside the BND snooping program and were partly succesful with this.

And when the BND noticed that a few thousand of these selectors were succesfully installed, they informed the german chancellery who miracly done... nothing at all to protect us against industrial spionage.

And they dont care about all the other stuff the US is committing from germany, like conducting their drone wars which make germany a legal war target.

The actual extent is still unknown. There is a possibility that industrial secrets have been transmitted, but there's no proof or even allegations of a particular case which has happened. I'd rather know more details before passing judgement.

There is enough evidence that the NSA does industrial espionage against Germany and Europe. Whether the BND was stupid enough to help them, remains to be seen.

The NSA has given target data to the BND and the BND has then handed over the collected intelligence about these targets to the NSA.

The check who were the targets, was a joke. There were literally millions of selectors and a quick check already delivered thousands of selectors which were directly against German interests.