the level of nonsense surrounding this story is hard to cut through, but binney is basically correct in how he's describing the spy game - which leads to the logical conclusion that the germans also have spies in the us government. obviously.

i have no indication that the state department has clued into this. but my hypothesis on what's going on is that snowden (and probably a few people involved with wikileaks) is the obvious spy connected to that clearly existing german intelligence network.

i think that what's happening here is a controlled leak by the germans (without american knowledge or approval) to create a crisis with the goal of reducing american influence in germany, and western continental europe generally.

which answers the question as to why they're spying in the first place.