Germany has three Prism programs running

After a special meeting of the Parliamentary Control Panel, the Government considers that the allegations against the intelligence services need to be cleared. In fact, black and yellow is relieved at one point.

The expectations before the visit of the Chancellor's Office chief, who is ultimately responsible for the coordination of the German intelligence services, was great: The opposition made pressure and demanded, among other things, education about the allegations of the past weekend, according to which the cooperation between local services and the American NSA much more closely shall be deemed accepted. The federal government had come more and more pressed to explain the affair.

On the other hand, there was about the intelligence services. They hoped to finally come out of the firing line.Pofalla pruning should provide details that stand before the services. And after almost three and a half hour session you have to say: task is fulfilled - but only as far as the limited information, have arrived from the USA.

For the Chairman of PMB, Thomas Oppermann (SPD), is therefore clear: "We have progressed no piece." Many questions are unanswered. Therefore, it will be in the coming weeks, two more meetings of the supervisory body.

However, many now seems clearer. This has also helped that the NSA has first issued an opinion since the beginning of the affair. Thus, there is - as the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) had reported - several programs named Prism.

Relief in respect of a complaint

This detail relieves the government at least in terms of an allegation: In the meantime it was said that the army was aware as early as 2011 by Prism and fed information about Afghanistan.

The document is available to the "world" and is stamped with "official use only", is now available, however, that this is actually a program other than the much discussed. In total there are even three different tools called Prism.

With the spyware detected by Snowden, according to NSA paper, the data of German citizens would thereby not collected millions. "The NSA and the rest of the U.S. government can not use this to randomly collect the contents of private communications of citizens of other nations," it says.

"Using this program is focused, purposeful, rather than on a legal basis and is anything but flat." The aim was to terrorism and cyber-defense and the fight against the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

A third, completely independent program

The second program is a prism occupied by the U.S. Department of Defense in Afghanistan tool to gather intelligence information and to search for them. Furthermore, there is a third, also occupied by the NSA Prism information portal, which is operated completely independently of the monitoring program described by Snowden.

The government thus seems to come from the defensive. There, it is believed to have cleared all the disputed points. Pofalla told how important the work of the intelligence services to "protect German citizens" was. The "ChefBK" also vehemently denied that the German services, the U.S. supported in bugging unlawful.

"The German intelligence services are working according to the law," Pofalla said. He dismissed reports that BND President Gerhard Schindler had called for a more lax data protection practices and the transfer of data to other services. It had been no such request.Schindler had confirmed in writing that he had not called for this.

Oppermann turn, saw it differently: Schindler had confirmed that it had tried to a looser interpretation. However, almost all the other participants were sure: a breach of law could be the BND chief no longer blame.