Spies failed to check properly what was being passed across to the US. […]

Germany’s intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), has been helping the NSA spy on European politicians and companies for years, according to the German news magazine Der Spiegel. The NSA has been sending lists of « selectors »—identifying telephone numbers, e-mail and IP addresses—to the BND, which then provides related information that it holds in its surveillance databases. According to the German newspaper Die Zeit, the NSA sent selector lists several times a day, and altogether 800,000 selectors have been requested. […]

The information about this activity has finally come out thanks to a long-running committee of inquiry, set up by the German Bundestag (federal parliament), which has been trying to get to the bottom of the NSA activities in Germany, and of the BND’s involvement in them. The committee’s investigation suggests that as many as 40,000 of the selectors were targeting European and German interests—far more than the 2,000 found by the BND. […]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/24/nsa-spied-on-eu-politicians-and-companies-with-help-from-german-intelligence/