The German Chaos Computer Club said Wednesday that it has added to its legal complaint about U.S. spying on German citizens evidence that the NSA allegedly snooped on at least one of its Tor servers.
The CCC filed a complaint with Germany's federal prosecutor, Harald Range, in February, demanding an investigation into the German government's alleged involvement in the U.S. National Security Agency's mass surveillance of German citizens.
However, while Range started an investigation into the alleged tapping of Merkel's phone by the NSA in June, he said there wasn't enough evidence to start a similar investigation into the widely reported mass surveillance of German citizens.
The CCC hopes that new publications exposing data collection explicitly targeting servers that are used to connect to The Onion Router (Tor) network, a network that encrypts data traffic through random servers in order to obscure users' identities, will change Range's mind.
An investigation by German broadcasters revealed in early July that an NSA spying tool called XKeyScore is used to snoop on Tor users. A Tor server operated by computer science student Sebastian Hahn was identified as one of the NSA's targets by the broadcasters.
He's not the only Tor server operator who was identified though. The publication of parts of the search pattern code used in XKeyscore also "provides proof that data traffic to and from a CCC-operated server of the Tor network was explicitly collected and stored," the CCC said Wednesday.
"While other documents from the Snowden publications show that currently even the NSA isn't able to entirely de-anonymize Tor, the fact of the now documented surveillance of the CCC server demonstrates beyond doubt the aggressive surveillance with which the NSA targets German citizens," the CCC said. It is expanding the legal complaint filed in February to include this new evidence.
The organization called it "beyond comprehension" that Range started an investigation of the wiretapping of Merkel's phone while not acting on the mass surveillance of large parts of the entire population.
"For this reason we're urging the Federal Prosecutor General to stop blocking investigations and start doing his job to avoid public ridicule," the organization said, adding that his refusal to investigate is irresponsible and enhances suspicion that Range is "bowing to German as well as international intelligence services on judicial grounds."
Range's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Loek is Amsterdam Correspondent and covers online privacy, intellectual property, open-source and online payment issues for the IDG News Service. Follow him on Twitter at @loekessers or email tips and comments to loek_essers@idg.com