One of the striking features of the responses to Edward Snowden‘s leaks about the snooping being carried out by the NSA and GCHQ is the insistence that everything is, of course, quite „legal.“ But gradually, it has emerged that this „legality“ is achieved through the use of loophole after loophole after loophole after loophole. Now it has been revealed that Germany‘s intelligence agency, the BND, has also been using this trick to enable it to spy on its own citizens — something that was assumed to be off-limits for it: