Credits

Title of the original German edition: Des Königs NSA. 1684 statt 1984.

© 2016 Thomas Hillenbrand, tomhillenbrand.de

All rights reserved

Prinn & Junzt, www.prinnjunzt.com

Design: wppt:kommunikation gmbh Süleyman Kayaalp, Beatrix Göge, wppt.de

Cover illustration: portrait of Jean-Baptiste Colbert by Philippe de Champaigne (1655)

Translation: Alison Gallup

Contents

Credits

Contents

The Eavesdroppers of Frankfurt

Establishing a Surveillance State

Letter Transport and Postal Services

The Black Chambers

Early Defense Strategies

Counter-Strategies

Impact

The End of the Chambers

Today

Bibliography

The Book

The Author

The Eavesdroppers of Frankfurt

On Gutleutstrasse, not far from Frankfurt’s main train station, there is a plain, corrugated metal warehouse. It has no windows; it has no company name. A passageway connects it with the adjacent office building, number 310, a structure that has also seen better days.  There is no indication whatsoever of the enormous amounts of information being processed at this location – for this complex of buildings is home to servers that form part of DE-CIX, the largest internet exchange point in the world. All in all, approximately four terabytes of data race through the various Frankfurt DE-CIX data centers per second. That’s equivalent to two billion typed pages. Hundreds of organizations from more than sixty countries are connected to DE-CIX, including nearly every major internet service provider. A substantial portion of global communication and data traffic passes through Frankfurt. While the data hurtles through the city’s center, there are some who are keeping their fingers firmly on the pulse of the data flow. The NSA scandal unleashed by Edward Snowden revealed that both the largest U.S. intelligence organization and its British counterpart, GCHQ, are constantly trying to tap key exchange points in an effort to gain access to all the world’s data traffic. DE-CIX, too, has been hit – its Frankfurt hub, after all, makes for a pretty good haul of information; indeed, it’s hard to imagine a better one. In 2015, Klaus Landefeld, who sits on the advisory board of DE-CIX Management GmbH, told the German parliamentary committee investigating the surveillance activities of the NSA that the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, had been tapping the Frankfurt exchange point and siphoning off information of interest since 2009. The BND then passes on what it collects to the Americans, and to others as well.

It may seem odd that the center of twenty-first century mass surveillance is situated in Frankfurt of all places. A look back in history reveals, however, that we’ve always been tracked and spied on – and that this particular German metropolis on the Main River has consistently played a key role.

Frankfurt has a long tradition when it comes to surveillance. In the 1960s, the telecommunications tower on Eschenheimer Landstrasse near the Zeil, Frankfurt’s busiest shopping street, was the convergence point for all incoming and outgoing telephone connections with foreign countries. There were no technical reasons whatsoever for the Bundespost (German Federal Post Office) – the state-run operation in charge of this – to channel all German long-distance calls through this building. Even back then, the lines were aggregated probably for the sole purpose of making it easier to listen in on conversations. And who was doing this? Mostly the National Security Agency. The NSA occupied several floors of the telecommunications tower and had a direct connection, via shielded dedicated lines, to the Bundespost’s switching center.

But we can go back much further. Frankfurt was also a regional intelligence center in the nineteenth, eighteenth, and even the seventeenth century – with a focus not on digital data or telephone conversations, of course, but on letters. In fact, the above-mentioned telecommunications tower was erected on the precise location where the Palais Thurn und Taxis, the palace of the house of Thurn und Taxis, once stood. Since 1501, this noble family had provided the capitaine et maistre de nos postes, later called the Kaiserlicher Hauptpostmeister (Imperial Chief Postmaster), for the Holy Roman Empire. So, even way back then Frankfurt was an information hub. Letters arriving here, and in other towns and cities, were opened and read in Frankfurt – and with a comprehensiveness that we find astounding today. As we consider the history of mass surveillance in what follows, it will become abundantly clear that organized spying on the general public has a much longer tradition than most of us are likely to be aware of. To some degree, the nightmare described by Orwell in 1984 was already happening in 1684.

Establishing a Surveillance State

Why 1684 of all years? Surely surveillance existed long before then? Haven’t those in power always intercepted messages, hoping to learn something about the intentions and plans of their adversaries or to get a sense of the public mood? Of course they have. Even during the Roman Republic the state deployed surveillance specialists, the frumentarii, agents who hung around the public marketplaces, the fora, and eavesdropped on conversations. Presumably they also read the occasional letter.

Later on, the reading of letters was already occurring with such regularity that in 1529 the Protestant reformer Martin Luther felt compelled to dedicate an entire treatise to the phenomenon. In his work, “Concerning Secret and Stolen Letters, together with an exposition of a Psalm, against George, Duke of Saxony,” he explained why the opening of other people’s letters was so reprehensible: “Suppose it came to pass that you or I valued a letter more than a thousand guilders. Should not such letter be as treasured and as dear as a thousand guilders? A thief is a thief, whether he is a money thief or a letter thief.”

 Luther knew that the value of confidential information contained in a letter can be considerable – and that the theft of this intellectual property is no less objectionable than an act of common pickpocketing. But whether in ancient Rome or in Luther’s day – the opening of letters was something that happened sporadically at best. When the opportunity presented itself, letters were unsealed and read, and maybe every so often someone would steal a whole sack of letters and open them all. But there were still no institutions that intercepted, read, extracted, and sorted information on a massive scale. Surveillance regimes as we know them today didn’t exist yet.

This is why the late seventeenth century is of such particular interest in the history of surveillance. It is no accident that the story of state-run spying begins to unfold in the early days of the modern era. For a regime to carry out real mass surveillance, certain basic requirements that did not exist prior to the start of the Baroque period need to be in place. There were three phenomena that paved the way for the development of spying regimes: the creation of an effective bureaucracy, the increase in flows of information, and the emergence of new threat scenarios.

The first requirement is as obvious as it is obligatory: to operate a big-brother-style system of surveillance, you first have to have a well-functioning state. Without access to an army of civil servants who can organize the spying, a ruler is not going to be able to snoop on his own citizens in any sort of comprehensive way. Not surprisingly, France blazed the trail when it came to mass monitoring. Under Louis XIV, the Sun King, France developed in the second half of the seventeenth century into Europe’s “poster country” for surveillance. Louis the Great, as he was called back then, stripped the French nobility of all its power. While nobles had previously assumed important administrative tasks at the local level and supplied troops, the king now started using, and maintaining direct access to, his own officials and a standing army.

Europe’s first modern bureaucracy came into being thanks to Louis XIV’s brilliant minister of finances, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who was vigorous in pursuing its formation. It is no accident that in his most famous surviving portrait, Colbert had himself depicted holding a folded piece of paper. The minister of finances was quicker than others to recognize that information is power – and that the pooling and orderly archiving of data brings enormous advantages. Colbert was obsessed with information. From Paris, his officials fanned out across the entire country. They went to monasteries, city halls, and palaces, and seized libraries full of documents on bookkeeping and the administration of justice – all with an eye toward amassing what they collected in a single, centrally located archive in the capital.

And so, in the service of his king, Colbert not only sorted out the state’s ailing finances – he was also tasked with monitoring and inspecting inflammatory texts and letters containing suspicious content.

The efficiency and skill with which his people accomplished this is something we’ll get to in a moment. But first to the second requirement for establishing a surveillance state: alongside a bureaucracy, any regime that snoops on its citizens needs information flows it can tap into. This, too, may sound obvious at first, but it is important to bear in mind that just two hundred years earlier, in the fifteenth century, hardly anyone could read and write apart from a few priests and aristocrats. A substantial amount of information was transmitted orally, something that poses a huge challenge for medievalists to this day. A great many fascinating details about this period – details about the lives of ordinary people, for example – were never committed to paper and thus can only be reconstructed, if they can be at all, through a considerable amount of cross-disciplinary effort.

From the mid-seventeenth century on, by contrast, there was hardly a single piece of important information that wouldn’t have been recorded in writing somewhere. In major cities like London, sixty percent of the population could now read and write. At the same time, lower paper prices meant pamphlet printing had become very cheap. Not surprisingly, one of the most popular pastimes among the bourgeoisie and lesser nobility was to meet in the coffeehouses that had started popping up everywhere. In these houses, the focus was less on the consumption of the “Turkish drink” and more on the exchange of information. Pamphlets, treatises, newspapers – any self-respecting coffeehouse had the latest news and publications on hand. And when it came to postal correspondence, the early cafés were crucial. If someone from Amsterdam, for example, wrote to a friend in London, he usually addressed the letter not to the recipient’s private home but to the nearest coffeehouse. The coffeehouse was a place you went on a regular basis to pick up your mail – and read it (while sipping a cup of coffee).

As analog social networks, the coffeehouses were the physical manifestation of an early, European-wide information space that can arguably already be described as virtual. For the seventeenth century saw the emergence of the République des Lettres, an ephemeral state structure that stretched across national boundaries and consisted solely of words and ideas. This Republic of Letters was, to a certain extent, the Baroque equivalent of the internet. Thousands of natural philosophers, scientists, and theologians throughout Europe corresponded by letter, exchanging information about the day’s issues. They all did this in the same language (French), and quite often they felt more of an allegiance to their Republic of Letters than they did to their respective countries or principalities.

All of this illustrates that information flowed in abundance during the seventeenth century – and with a remarkable degree of reliability, too. For the ever-growing volume of correspondence was also capable of traveling great distances, thanks