As a German I would suggest to just ask the NSA to leave the country. Additionally, I do not want Gabriel to become chancellor, but I would like to see Merkel and de Maizière (who already survived a remarkable amount of scandals) getting bitten by this. America is a friend and important to us, but even more are our ties to France and the EU, which should be our number one priority by a large margin.
But as soon as you argue in that direction someone from an agency, who wants to play with the big guys and their big toys, comes along and argues how America is critical for our security and how endangered we are and that Germany did not had a terrorist attack yet just because the mighty US of A guards us. If he is good at his job, he manages to slip in the Marshall Plan as well. People seem to believe this, even if they know, how our agencies fail to prevent (non-islamic) terrorism [0] and that it was in fact the police on its own that caught the attempted (islamic) bomber in Frankfurt last week [1].
Every time we hear about a new scandal in our German secret services, i await the news of another terrorist cell to be busted. I am rarely disappointed. Cynical me imagines a little cottage industry inside the secret services, always with a small queue of potential terrorists that their handlers can then push further on short notice. These terrorists can then be raided and presented to the public, reinvigorating our fear and making us think that the deep state is the lesser of two evils. And then, after a few weeks, it is back to business as usual.
The conspiracy nut part of me could also believe that they have a parallel stream of stupid and mentality ill ones that can be used to actually implement 'terrorist' attacks, but are supposed to be both directed, then contained and killed before they can inflict too much damage (or talk afterwards in front of a jury).
Quick summary:
The person the people in the Sauerland cell called "boss" and who organised the fuses for them was a "contact person" for MİT (Turkish intelligence org.) and CIA.
I knew of a SWAT member of a particular California police dept who said most drug raids (think: medium to large scale) were preceded by a phone call to the person they were going to raid to warn them in advance and to leave at least some drugs and lower level people around for show.
Would you? That allegation, if true, would open a whole bag of hurt without definite, irrefutable proof. You'd need more than personal experience to push that through the court system. You need full, authenticated documentary evidence, from multiple channels before that charge had an ice-cube's chance in hell of being treated seriously.
This is one of the main difficulties of challenging governments in court. The proof of guilt needs to be orders of magnitude above that needed to prove an individual person guilty, as they can always divert the blame to some unknown, undocumented, "unauthorized" section of the staff. Scapegoat found, case dismissed, continue as before.
Technically a bunch of anecdotes is data, but is it good enough for a court? Eventually you'll need some actual proof.
> Even if you have nothing but eyewitness testimony, there is much value in filing an official complaint.
Some would prefer to do this anonymously, but then it tends to carry less credence in court. Attaching your name to an official complaint such as this could be seen as risky, depending on your trust in your local government.
Your stance is 100% correct from a moral standpoint, but may not pass many people's risk vs. reward filters.
I should say here that I have direct knowledge of this because my best friend worked for customs (who was involved in the raid, who is involved in basically all raids within the 150 mile exclusion zone or whatever insane distance it is near the border) and was tasked with retrieving and delivering the phone number of the target to the person that made the call, and was present while the call was made. 1) I am nowhere in the chain of people on either side of that raid, 2) This happened several years ago and my best friend no longer works for customs, 3) This is not even the shocking kind of thing that happens in the course of the US government conducting its business. While outrageous and almost unbelievable, the real shocking stuff is what customs and border patrol (CBP) can do within that 150-mile exclusion zone (or whatever it is these days, 300, 500, who knows). This is why all local and federal law enforcement raids are accompanied by customs people, since they have the power to do whatever they want, literally, without a warrant. So the raid technically becomes LEOs "escorting" customs officials. Srs bns.
I believe the key difference here is gathering information on technologies for national security benefit versus gathering information to be used to benefit French businesses.
"In the space of a single year, according to the internal documents, this operation produced 260 classified reports that allowed US politicians to conduct successful talks on political issues and to plan international investments."
> ... but even more are our ties to France and the EU, which should be our number one priority by a large margin.
I don't think Germany considers the EU as its number one priority. There may be a number of reasons, namely: a) The growth in exports to China; b) The long-term European crisis; c) The notion that EU countries are an already conquered market, with little penetration growth left.
Regardless of reasons, Germany's behaviour is clear: The 2011 crisis presented Germany with a unique opportunity to lead Europe. Germany could have financially supported Euro-bonds, leveraging this support to mandate fiscal policy in countries that bought said bonds. This would have effectively placed Germany in a leader role for fiscal policy. Even if this had to formally be done by EU institutions, those with the money have the power. This had virtually no costs for Germany. In a success scenario would be a cash-positive move, as it'd be acting as a development bank: borrowing cheap on one end, lending with a margin on the other, with the added bonus of Euro-wide fiscal policy control.
By skipping this clear opportunity, Germany has signaled it is not interested in further developing the EU. I think this is a strategic mistake with a multi-decade horizon. The opportunity presented by the 2011 crisis won't happen again. Worse, there is now the very real scenario that monetary pressures, coupled with a Grexit trigger will breakup the Euro area and really weaken the EU.
I think you have to understand that lots of people are "conflicted". By that i mean while some people personally might find something tasteless, they never the less can find usefulness and justification, just as long as someone else does the dirty work for them.
So, for example, may not have the heart to get a bum vagrant or homeless person from your entrance, but you'd totally be okay if your neighbor or another entity went around making sure the homeless person was shooed somewhere else because you too feel fatigued by the reeking urine at the door to your building. Or, that pest rat. I don't like the idea of animal cruelty, but never the less, please get rid of that rat for me, I don't care how you do it, just don't tell me. I just don't want to see it again.
So that is to say, one might not like some things, but we're okay, so long as someone else gets their hands dirty in our stead. Just don't let me know the dirty details and embarrass me or my conscience.
A few weeks ago China was attacking a US company (GitHub), and many Americans here called for China to be kicked off the internet. Now the USA is spying on French companies. I presume the same people will call for the USA to be kicked off the internet?
> I presume the same people will call for the USA to be kicked off the internet?
Or at least put the DNS root zone under international control (currently the root zone is under control of the Department of Commerce; cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_root_zone).
I am trying to think how on earth can we avoid that in the future... Every country will turn into an closed-Internet Island. You won't be able to buy anything abroad without being taxed (multiple times), you won't be able to purchase remote services (even if they are far superior).
Government will turn the internet into something unimaginably ugly. Then we'll have books to explain how the internet was once upon a time.
It would be interesting to see the major consumer electronics companies, already in opposition to the governments' growing control of the internet, start to add new root DNSes.
Sadly, I suspect a phase of that sort is inevitable. For all the good it has done, the Internet inherently transcends national borders and therefore national cultures, laws, and tax systems. Western governments are, as a rule, all in favour of globalization when it means they can have cheap imports and new export markets, but much less keen on it when it means giving up control or tax revenues.
With physical international travel, and even physical shipping, there are inherent barriers to crossing borders or places where governments can impose checkpoints and reassert their authority at least within their own domain. With the Internet, as long as it remains open as it mostly is today, governments lack that control. Normal people deal with foreign contacts and businesses routinely every day. This is a threat to established powers like big businesses and governments, particularly in economic terms.
Given the most powerful efforts at international trade agreements we're seeing today -- the likes of TPP and TTIP -- are not even being negotiated with real scrutiny by elected legislators any more, never mind the general public, I think we can safely assume that the upper echelons are now so corrupt that the present system is beyond hope. I would like to think that the freedom of communication and sharing of knowledge offered by the Internet would lead to a better system taking over, but as a realist I fear an increasing tendency to lock things down instead, at least for the short-to-medium term. Can't have governments losing their sales taxes, major IP holders losing out to more liberal foreign IP regimes, and the like.
Obviously that lock-down will actually be catastrophic both culturally and economically, by hurting both the normal citizen and the small/young businesses trying to offer better ways to do things. I just don't think the big business/big government complexes that dominate Western politics today care, as long as they keep their figures up for the next quarter/election.
That all said, I remain optimistic that in the long run the advantages of the Internet will win out. Sooner or later a generation who grew up never knowing a world without mobile communications and the Internet will come to power. Before then, corporate and government greed in the West may lead to another financial crisis and questions asked about our current systems of government and business practices last time may turn to direct action in more than just a few places like Greece.
I suspect we're going to go through a pretty dark phase over the next few years as governments and business communities led by people who frankly don't understand the technology anyway most of the time struggle to adapt to a changing world they can no longer manipulate as they used to. But I don't think it will last forever, because the dinosaurs will become extinct in a decade or two and those who replace them will remember what they did.
There is a research and industry effort underway to replace TCP/IP with content-centric or named-data networking. No more servers or IP addresses. All content would be uniquely identified and optionally signed. It would become much easier to control content distribution, since routers would be aware of content names and caching. Think Cloudflare writ large.
Thanks to both of you for the links. Although it's an interesting premise, I think we can safely assume any large-scale practical implementations of this kind of technology are some way off, so unfortunately I don't think it changes my initial conclusion: we're likely to see more locking down and partitioning of today's Internet for a while, before any more open and robust long-term solutions take hold (perhaps based on the kind of alternative future architectures you mentioned).
You have to understand that some circles of the german internet avantgarde have a beloved Feindbild [1] when in comes to the Spiegel (google "ehemaliges Nachrichtenmagazin" [ironic "former news journal"]).
It's not a tabloid and people read it [2]. The online page is clickbait under the fold but the first two/three article will usually offer a good and conscience overview. If that's a virtue is another question. Other sites have less gossip or a different point of view, but the headline articles are usually the same on all major online news outlets nowadays.
If you want more serious news maybe faz.net [3] is worth a look.
Spiegel went from investigative journalism decades ago to publishing very shallow and (in case of its online version) click-baity articles. Süddeutsche is certainly more insightful.
But at least it is safe to say that Spiegel is not much politically biased on a whole.
I can't tell you which magazine or news paper never lied or copied or makes a hell lot of propaganda.
I mean listen to our radio stations, they make the whole scandal less painful and de Maizre will be our hero.
I mean hello???
In Germany and In America people should be brought to jail for doing such things. Its directly against the german and the american way of "democracy", whatever that means at that time.
Seriously, Tagesschau is way too close to the government to be considered a reliable news source and they often under-report on things that could put CDU/SPD in a bad light.
Tagesschau? Really? To often they show pictures from wrong places and have a lot of hoax. Just google for "tagesschau falschmeldungen". I personaly trust Spiegel more... but thats only my opinion ;)
Googling that brings you to Putins fans and islamophobes. Googling that with Spiegel brings you to Spiegel Online...well I don't know. I'll stay with the tagesschau for my daily 8PM news overview and look for details somewhere on the net avoiding Spiegel Online. Can't do anything bad this way ;)
As said, its just my opinion (and iam not a Putin fan or any fan of any politican out there). And i also look the 8PM news at Tagesschau, but, as you said by yourself, its always good to get more details somewhere else (SPON or not)
Absoluely. Both their news and their opinion pieces are excellent, and I would recommend a subscription to the print magazine, for a good weekly summary of world news, albeit with a slight UK slant.
Of course they did. It's the explicit job of these organizations (in all countries) to spy on foreign powers, multi-national companies, and potential people that may be a threat.
We spy on our best allies and you'd better believe they spy on us. We just happen to have the evidence of the US doing it thanks to Snowden.
It may not be right but they all do it.
Edit: Really? Down voted for saying that most countries probably do this? I'm not saying its right, just that it's not particularly surprising.
You have no clue. The BND helped the NSA to spy on GERMANS and GERMAN companies. Plus EUROPEANs.
It's not the job of the BND to help the NSA to spy on Germany and the EU.
> We spy on our best allies and you'd better believe they spy on us. We just happen to have the evidence of the US doing it thanks to Snowden.
Look, the difference is this: we have literally THOUSANDS of NSA, CIA and US military agency personal in Germany. There are huge official installations of the NSA, the CIA and US military in Germany. Instead of respecting the host country, they are spying on us, collecting data, manage their wars, disrespecting our laws, ...
There is nothing, absolutely NOTHING, even remotely comparable done by Germany in or around the US.
> The BND helped the NSA to spy on GERMANS and GERMAN companies.
Didn't know that part. Thats an interesting twist. I could understand them working together against someone else but not against themselves. Must be part of that "Five eyes" cooperation thing Snowden was talking about.
Oh, but Germany isn't part of the five eyes alliance. I think that's what hurt us the most. Our government really believed in a German/American alliance. And then we found out we didn't belong into the inner circle.
And now the politicians finally realized what it means to give a foreign power access to your internet nodes. Sure we need the cooperation, but my guess is the politicians and the executive organs could not imagine the NSA would use this to harm our economy.
fiveeyes is hardly a secret. It's existence isn't even classified. For example, I've sat in presentations with nationals from many countries, and the non-fiveeyes members would occassionally be asked to leave the room at the end to allow the fiveeyes nations to divulge some further information. But the other nations were told before leaving that the next part of the presentation was fiveeyes only.
If I understand this correctly, Boeing (US) and Airbus (EU) are competing head to head for extremely valuable contracts. The NSA tasks the BND to spy on Airbus employees and the company in order to maintain Boeing's competitive edge over Airbus. In doing so, threatening the jobs of fellow Germans (and other Europeans).
This is exactly whats going on, the NSA tried to get their selectors inside the BND snooping program and were partly succesful with this.
And when the BND noticed that a few thousand of these selectors were succesfully installed, they informed the german chancellery who miracly done... nothing at all to protect us against industrial spionage.
And they dont care about all the other stuff the US is committing from germany, like conducting their drone wars which make germany a legal war target.
The actual extent is still unknown. There is a possibility that industrial secrets have been transmitted, but there's no proof or even allegations of a particular case which has happened. I'd rather know more details before passing judgement.
There is enough evidence that the NSA does industrial espionage against Germany and Europe. Whether the BND was stupid enough to help them, remains to be seen.
The NSA has given target data to the BND and the BND has then handed over the collected intelligence about these targets to the NSA.
The check who were the targets, was a joke. There were literally millions of selectors and a quick check already delivered thousands of selectors which were directly against German interests.
So get upset with the BND then. That would at least have a chance of your anger actually achieving something, instead of waving your fist at the NSA from across the ocean, because frankly, they don't really care what German citizens think.
And if, because of a giant public outrage, this "cooperation" will be stopped, the NSA will not like this situation. Thus, indirectly, the NSA cares a lot, what the Germans think.
In English, the idiom "Don't care what they think" means "don't care what they feel". Though I understand how that might lead to miscomprehension from non-native speakers ;)
I do understand. My country (Australia) has US spy bases in it too ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Gap ), which they have also used to spy on Australians. In Australia's case (and I would be willing to bet that it's the same for Germany), it was a quid pro quo arrangement. Australians spy on Americans and pass the information to the NSA. Americans spy on Australians and pass it to the Australian spy agencies - thereby avoiding restrictions on domestic spying. Seriously, your problem is with the BND, not NSA, because NSA is going to spy on you regardless of whether you want them to. It's pretty much their job. You just don't want the BND actively helping them, which is why your energy should be directed towards them.
That's not all the US is doing in Deutschland. "[T]he slides show that the facilities at Ramstein perform an essential function in lethal drone strikes conducted by the CIA and the U.S. military in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Africa."[0]
So it is not just spying on the EU that is being enabled by Germany's government, it is the entirety of the US drone program that is being used across the Middle East and north Africa. This program, operating as it does outside of declared war zones, is very probably illegal under German law.
What I suspect is actually not "helping", but rather "blind trust" -- e.g. just having an arrangement with the US where the US sends in "selectors" and the Germans send over the data; and nobody competent/willing to screen the selectors the US sends in ahead of deploying them.
I think there are strong incentives to turn a semi-blind eye to what the US is sending in (or what is going out) -- until shit hits the fan...
It's presumably the job of the BND to collect information about threats to Germany. If they've determined that the most effective way for them to achieve that is to submit to the NSA completely and beg for whatever scraps USA is willing to leave them, there's a fair chance that is true. If you question that assessment, that means you are questioning their competence at espionage, which doesn't bode well for their ability to collect the information themselves without the NSA's help.
We are talking about governments spying on their own citizens and not on other countries.
And I find it incredible that opinions such as yours are so prevalent. Because yes, it should be surprising, as this happens with governments that we elected and that should serve us and our rights. And when this happens too often with no relief in sight, it usually means that we need a revolution.
The NSA revelations are actively hurting USA's economy. You may not see it, but European companies have started to actively avoid US-made and US-hosted products and services, because guess what, people do care about it, especially companies that are increasingly worried about industrial espionage from American companies.
Therefore I usually think of shilling when seeing such pieces of opinion, because it's easy to gather a bunch of trolls to try and shift the public opinion by posting such messages on public forums - I know that at least the Chinese and the Israelis are doing it. But then I think of Occam's Razor and remember that people are in essence just sheep wanting to be shepherd.
> The NSA revelations are actively hurting USA's economy. You may not see it, but European companies have started to actively avoid US-made and US-hosted products and services, because guess what, people do care about it, especially companies that are increasingly worried about industrial espionage from American companies.
Who are they buying from, then? All of Europe is spying on each other. German companies even refer to France as the "evil empire" of industrial espionage - not the USA. And of course many other countries like China are also spying.
When I hear European politicians lobbying for local hosting services and the like, I think it in part has much more to do with getting more negotiating power at the international surveillance table. NSA had hooks directly into various services that other countries had to bargain with the NSA for, if they can get services hosted in their own countries, they can be the go-to organization and have more bargaining chips.
> German companies even refer to France as the "evil empire" of industrial espionage
I've never heard such a statement from German companies (and I live in Germany). Related to industrial espionage are rather China (for obvious reasons) and the United States (the latter even before Snowden: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enercon#Industriespionage.3F_De...).
> In a 2009 US diplomatic cable revealed by Wikileaks, an unnamed German CEO of a satellite manufacturer was quoted calling France “the evil empire, stealing technology, and Germany knows this”, adding that French industrial spying was doing as much damage as anything coming from Russia or China
> Colourful stories about the lengths the French secret services would go to emerged in the early 1990s, such as the bugging of seats on Air France planes to eavesdrop on American business leaders.
> At the time, then-CIA director Stansfield Turner qualified French intelligence as “the most predatory service in the world, now that the old Soviet Union is gone”
Every EU country has been playing this game for centuries. It's always stunning to me how much more faith Europeans have in their governments than Americans do, even though they get up to the same kind of shenanigans.
People also seem to forget about major French companies like VUPEN, who research and buy 0-day vulnerabiliies with the express purpose of selling them to French intelligence services (and intelligence services of allied countries).
I have no doubt France's intelligence services are just as bad as NSA.
that's why I stopped buying anything that touched american hand/soil, if possible/reasonable. I like many individuals there, but the idea that even a cent would go to that orwellian system that is a net negative to mankind is a bit too much to handle
I feel similar, but it's not just because of surveillance but also because of torture, war, bullying smaller countries, financing terrorism and more.
In some areas its hard to evade products out of the United States of Central North America and my reaction is to lose interest in these thing altogether.
The BND broke the law and then lied to the German Parliament about it. That's what the outrage is about.
Germany has a law regulating surveillance (the G10 Act). It has a number of safeguards to prevent indiscriminate and illegal spying. As far as I know, the BND illegally ignored several of them.
Being a spy agency doesn't mean that you're outside the law.
Spying on other EU nations is not any better. There are strict rules that target selectors used for mass surveillance must obey. Any target selector must be related to the prevention of one of the following:
1. An attack against German territory (i.e. war).
2. International terrorist attacks related to Germany.
3. International arms trafficking.
4. Drug smuggling as part of organized crime.
5. Endangering the stability of the Euro through counterfeiting activities abroad.
6. International money laundering at a large scale.
7. Human trafficking.
Mass surveillance by the BND for purposes outside of these seven areas is not allowed, period; any personal data intercepted that is not related to these areas must be deleted. Most of the target selectors provided by the NSA to the BND did not fall into any of these areas.
Which is probably why they used the NSA to do it. NSA spies on the people and hand the Germans the data. Germans don't technically breach their own laws and both get the intel.
I think it is the complicity of the BND on behalf of the US that has got Germans annoyed, as well as asking a German spy agency to spy on, and feed information on German companies, to the detriment of those companies in favour of US companies.
Germans are just starting to realize that they are as much a US poodle as the Brits across the pond.
There is nothing to realize. That's known for a long time. Other than GB we have been occupied by the US, we have large US installations here - including the US military central commands for Europe and Africa (!). The situation is understandable, because Germany caused and lost WWII. But after 70 years since the war has ended, many Germans wish that the US stops using Germany as tool.
With the amount that Germany spends on defence, subjugating the entire defense and intelligence community to the US might be the optimal strategy. Defence may be like Facebook - if you won't pay cash you'll have to pay in other ways.
Germany is one of the top defense spending countries.
You may check also a map. Germany is surrounded by friends. Germany also doesn't have an empire to maintain.
We have spend billions on useless adventures like in Afghanistan. Luckily Germany was not stupid enough to take part in other adventures: Iraq, Libya, ...
That the US decides to spend as much as the next twenty countries together is only their problem. But the US politics has made parts of the world a very unsafe place. Check the US politics in north-africa and middle east: toppling regimes and trying to install new regimes. This has created a huge mess and creates problems throughout the region. The rise of ISIS/IS is one of those results.
what you call an adventure is by most muslims percieved as rape and genocide of their homelands. we don't have another world to move to, so we'll have to deal with all the cp US does (and Russia too, I don't see much difference in foregin policies and results nowadays). Have no doubt - legacy of this will be present for generations, and currently we might still not reached the peak of these atrocities.
He was being sarcastic. It was obviously not an adventure in the Famous Five sense.
Europe is really suffering now because of the idiocy of American politicians. There are massive waves of migrants fleeing Syria into Europe via boats. Thousands are dying at sea, hundreds of thousands are arriving or being rescued. There is nowhere to put them all. America and its stooges turned these north African countries into anarchy zones and now Europe is paying the price of taking care of the refugees.
I think its a "trust but verify" mentality. You know that your neighbor is probably trust worthy but you still keep tabs on them to make sure they are not secretly planning something against you.
The issue you have with stopping yourself is that your neighbor may still be doing so, and I'd imagine from a nation's perspective its crucial to have the same kind of info on them that others have on you.
"trust but verify" is an old Russian proverb and was Reagan's line that he used to refer to the USSR WRT a nuclear disarmament treaty.
Are we treating the Germans like the old USSR now? Is having an unfair advantage in commerce as important as knowing where are all of the nuclear missiles that are aimed at us?
I think it is somewhat less "crucial" than you appear to think; and I think that "because fuck you, that's why" is the foreign policy of a thug.
If it's apparently less crucial than I think then why do most major governments have clandestine intelligence services whose sole purpose is to spy on other nations?
Just because you have some paranoid fuckups in your government doesn't mean you should give them all powers unchecked, right? Like all else in hierarchical structures, there should be some proper oversight and control, by unbiased authorities (well, it would be nice at least). Problem seems to be, these services run at free will, they feel above law and constitution, justifying just about everything with "terrorist threat" mantra. Politicians seems weak/corrupt so they don't stand for common citizen's rights. Somebody from Obama's government expressed frustration once how all these services/programs/activities run basically on autopilot, and nobody dares to cut their budget.
Let's take a step back... does anybody truly believe current terrorism can shake foundations of any western society? I don't mean blowing hypothetical nukes in manhattan, but real things that happened. Planes falling, buildings collapsing, very sad events, but nothing major in civilization perspective. Our perception of these events is hugely disproportionate, based on our fears. Yet we are, step by step, losing our freedom like the alternative would be total annihilation and end of the world as we know it. Not even terrorist themselves want that. And they are not winning in any measurable way.
It's natural for any ambitious organisational unit, with strong leader, to try to grab all power, influence etc that's available. Normal comapnies have strict boundaries how far the power can reach, so for example you won't find a single bank that is effectively run by it's head of IT, in fact in contrary (IT is a true backoffice, in the back of the back of the back of the rest). Just set the boundaries and enforce them with budget cuts threat. Now who will do that is the question :)
On a statistical side almost anything else is likely to kill you. There's probably more people killed each year by ladders than some perceived external threat, and I don't see a war on ladders happening anywhere.
I do believe intelligence services are necessary. Essentially a government has two different sources of information: the overt sources, and the covert sources.
Both have their problems. The overt sources are easy for adversaries (in a very broad sense) to manipulate and observe. The covert sources have the inherent problem that less oversight usually means incompetence and abuse.
I have partly to agree, nobody cares if you spy on their citizens. However, once you can prove industrial espionage it becomes a totally different discussion.
I posted this in response to a comment downthread, then realized that it's probably more appropriate at the top level, given the headline. Sorry for the dupe.
That's not all the US is doing in Deutschland. "[T]he slides show that the facilities at Ramstein perform an essential function in lethal drone strikes conducted by the CIA and the U.S. military in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Africa."[0]
So it is not just spying on the EU that is being enabled by Germany's government, it is the entirety of the US drone program that is being used across the Middle East and north Africa. This program, operating as it does outside of declared war zones, is very probably illegal under German law.
It's not the first time to see collaboration like that. Time and again I find it fascinating how the members of the “surveillance community” seem to have a closer relationship with each other (across countries) than with their respective civilian compatriots.
It is the 'us and them' mentality. I know someone who worked in a government security service.
Their opinion of the general population's ability to self-govern is less than positive.
To be clear, I've put that quite diplomatically. They think we are a bunch of idiots who don't understand the bigger picture. Of course the fact that the bigger picture is deliberately kept secret from us is overlooked.
They are self serving, but what is worse in the US is that the security services are basically a bunch of private firms, who have a vested interest in keeping the government spending billions of dollars. Many of those companies also have vested interests in selling arms. It isn't a good mix.
...and we see results of this every day in news. "Follow the money" rule should be used all the time as default when trying to understand what the hell is going on in this world
It's called the Deep State. Germans feel outrage because, up to now, the Deep State was meant to keep the volatile and dangerous (not to mention swarthy and Muslim) Turks in line. now the Germans find they don't really run their own country for the purpose of anything of importance to the US. Their "democracy" is as well-managed as Turkey's.
this isn't surprising. Germans should be outraged since the late 90ies. The topic has been in and out of the news in Germany since long before Snowden. What the Americans did with projects like ‟Echolon” was openly known to most (albeit disputed by the Americans).
Many Germans were more or less aware of Echolon, but most thought it wouldn't be that bad (I was not among them from beginning and was talking against a brick wall (and still do in related topics)). With Snowden lots of Germans became aware that all these few alerters that were laughed down were right from the beginning.
The sad thing is, in Germany the public doesn't really seem to care. They are still the same nation that follows allong blindly until the shit is hitting the fan. Of course, when the crash comes, the responsibility will be delegated upwards.
I think it's that way everywhere.
When I talked to people about it in Switzerland they often respond with something like "this isn't a problem here, this is $country_where_i_live_in they wouldn't abuse their powers. The NSA? Sure THEY are horrible, but in $country_where_i_live_in, nah, they wouldn't do stuff like that. That's impossible."
You can point out that the last time they did (and got caught) was only 26 years ago [0]. They don't care.
Do you have any proof for this bold claim? I will try to prove that quite the opposite is true: Germany has a very active civil society and privacy ("Datenschutz") and transparency is on the agenda not only of the opposition party "Die Grünen" and the small "Piratenpartei", but also by organizations such as Chaos Computer Club, Netzpolitik.org and Verbraucherzentrale. There have been huge demonstrations, "Freiheit statt Angst" (Freedom instead of fear), with thousands demonstrating in Berlin and elsewhere. You can find all material on their website, also in English - http://freiheitstattangst.de/aufruf/
Some people care about it, yes. But obviously only a small percentage, the general public doesn't care as long as Merkel is in office and says nothing to worry about.
Just like this Simpsons quote
Homer: "Lisa, the whole reason we have elected officials is so we don't have to think all the time. Just like that rain forest scare a few years back. Our officials saw there was a problem and they fixed it, didn't they?"
You are obviously misusing the statistic. First off, the question that 55% answered positively was not whether they liked the NSA, but whether "in order to prevent terror attacks, you have to live with mass spy activities". That is shameless framing because you give a negative consequence no one wants (terror attacks). It is not too surprising that a majority answers yes to the solution the interviewer proposes. But would such a majority of interviewees come up with the solution themselves? I highly doubt it. Just ask any passerby: "Please finish this sentence: 'In order to prevent terror attacks, spying ...'.
Additionally, the very same interviewees are surprised just how much Germany has been spyed on (61%). Note the framing here again. Here you have no evaluation, but just a very weak sensation ("surprised"). The interviewer could also have asked: "Do you like how much the NSA spied on Germany?" - and I bet the answer would have been clear.
And again, there are very few topics that we think the public cares about (taxes, pension) and again, how do we notice they might care? Media. As with privacy. As with immigration. As with any other political topic.
> But they don't have my password to access my email?
> I have nothing to hide
> Why do you run a tor relay? Somebody who needs that much privacy obviously has something bad going on.
Of course there are exceptions who actually care about that stuff, but I'm afraid most don't or have no idea what they're doing. Source: CDU is still the strongest party.
The exception is institutionalized: Der Verbraucherschutz and the various Datenschutzbeauftragte keep complaining whenever the ruling parties try to weaken the privacy laws. And the outrage about password leaks and other data security related news in all publications, be them more right-leaning like the FAZ or Welt, or left-leaning, such as TAZ, Spiegel or Frankfurter Rundschua, prove, that there is consciousness and interest. Media does not write about random things. They write for their audience. Hence there must be many people who care. Pointing to CDU is also not very convincing. Despite having the weakest position among all parties, they still support privacy issues, especially due to their close relations with German companies. And yes, those care a lot about privacy. There is massive outrage about the latest relevations - Airbus already declared they would sue Germany over this.
The problem is that there are more issues than that and overall at least comparatively Germany is doing rather well at the moment.
Our current government consists of a large coalition between the SPD and the CDU/CSU. A government in which neither of these parties take part would be a massive practically unthinkable shift.
No matter how much you care about this issue -- and keep in mind the majority doesn't really care about any issue enough to vote -- doing anything about it comes with a very high risk.
So no matter how much we may dislike the BND situation, nothing about it is going to change simply because there is no other party that can both be trusted to change anything about it and successfully run the government.
I totally agree! But does economical success outweigh political failings on this scale? I mean even if people don't want to vote for another party, there are other means to be heard. Yet the citizens remain largely silent over this issue.
What "shit" is hitting what "fan"? We're not following blindly. Far from it. There is a big conversation going on and the government might fall over this incident.
It's important to note that if the government will fall, it's not because of the citizens, but because of the opposition. This is not the first controversy the government faces after the Snowden relevations, yet the CDU doesn't seem to lose voters over this.
I sure hope not. Nobody running in that election has anything to do with the scandal, but there sure are candidates which could harm Bremen a lot in the coming few years.
I did not mean dangerous in terms of dictatorship or something like that, more in the terms of doing a very very bad job. There was the Schill Party in Hamburg, which comes to mind. Small party, got elected on tough speech alone, then went on to fail miserably.
The AfD is running in Bremen, as is "Die Linke". Both could be a disaster waiting to happen.
What I know until now does not make me want to elect a new government. Really. I'm German and I follow the political scene.
This scandal is bad enough. I understand the urge to slap the government. But that punishment would ultimately hurt our society more than it would hurt the responsible parties. I don't see a chancellor that I don't believe will do a worse job than Merkel, and getting rid of the two dominant parties only leaves inexperienced and incompetent politicians to do the job.
> only leaves inexperienced and incompetent politicians to do the job.
I think the idea that politicians primarily need to be experienced is a great mistake. It's not like they really run the government, which is really done by a huge number of government employees and experts a layer below.
What _does_ matter is integrity, a willingness to balance interests, listening to experts and aligning with the political position of those who elected you (e.g. a social democrat should probably focus more on the interests of workers - it puzzles me how the fact that there really are different interests that do not always align and that much of politics is therefore really about power is always ignored in favour of "experience").
And, by the way, some current German top politicians often _already_ seem quite incompetent. It seems unfair to just claim that members of smaller parties are more incompetent.
Then you're simply wrong. I'm not equivocal about that. Experience in politics is - for me - the primary factor which qualifies a politician for a particular office. This is because of two things: First because they really are doing a very difficult job, they really are designing and discussing laws, and they are making decisions all day long. Secondly, looking at what they did before is the most reliable means by which voters can predict future performance. It's not 100% reliable, but not even one more accurate way has been discovered yet.
I can back that up by recent history: Look at what Syriza does to Greece. The prior governments were undeniably corrupt and did so much wrong it's way beyond funny. Still, Syriza, with its completely inexperienced politicians running a first-world country in a deep crisis, are arguably doing even worse.
In Germany there are only two parties who even have enough distinguished members to run a working government. The rest simply don't have enough leadership staff for the job. If these were to form a government, nobody would have heard of many of the ministers ever before, even people who take an interest in politics.
And on top of that, these smaller parties tend to experience a lot more problems than the big ones. I don't want to see something like the Chaos of the AFD and recently the FDP with a party who should be busy running the country.
> Then you're simply wrong. I'm not equivocal about that. Experience in politics is - for me - the primary factor which qualifies a politician for a particular office.
So you would vote for Nixon, essentially.
> I can back that up by recent history: Look at what Syriza does to Greece. The prior governments were undeniably corrupt and did so much wrong it's way beyond funny. Still, Syriza, with its completely inexperienced politicians running a first-world country in a deep crisis, are arguably doing even worse.
I don't see how they could do worse than the prior governments, considering that they are by and large responsible for Greece' current situation. Besides, even this was the case, this is just one example.
> And on top of that, these smaller parties tend to experience a lot more problems than the big ones.
You should look at the French UMP for a counter-example, it's the best performance of slow political suicide I know of.
> I can back that up by recent history: Look at what Syriza does to Greece. The prior governments were undeniably corrupt and did so much wrong it's way beyond funny. Still, Syriza, with its completely inexperienced politicians running a first-world country in a deep crisis, are arguably doing even worse.
Can you back up your claims that Syriza hurts Greece? From what I know, they actually defend the peoples interests and stand up to the criminals (e.g. Germany) that try to shake down their country using shady finance schemes set in to place by German politicians with the help of Greece's previous corrupt governments.
> In Germany there are only two parties who even have enough distinguished members to run a working government. The rest simply don't have enough leadership staff for the job. If these were to form a government, nobody would have heard of many of the ministers ever before, even people who take an interest in politics.
I'd prefer randomized decisions over these crooks any time. CDU isn't worthy to even talk about. Really. Its a criminal joke party. SPD was born a backstabber and still is a backstabber. Wer hat uns verraten?
What we need is a government with ethics. As one of the richest nations around we owe it to the world to set a precedent. Put the peoples rights and the environment first. Treat surrounding countries with dignity.
Personally I'd give Die Linke a chance, see what happens. They do most of the critical political work already, which is mainly exposing the crimes of the ruling government.
> And on top of that, these smaller parties tend to experience a lot more problems than the big ones. I don't want to see something like the Chaos of the AFD and recently the FDP with a party who should be busy running the country.
We don't want to see the AfD at all. They're Neo-Nazis.
You must be thinking of the Mugabe of 30 years ago. Between the political violence, the graft and the cronyism, he is about as far from honest as he could be.
I think these examples are particularly well chosen. Putin and Mugabe are quasi-dictators running authoritarian states, and I don't even know the slightest bit about Haughey.
And Russia is arguably having quite a bit of trouble, economically, not even just because of the sanctions but because the general corruption in the country just doesn't allow for a sufficient retooling of the Russian economy. And the sanctions are a direct consequence of Putin not wanting to play by the rules and now being excluded from the game.
How familiar with Russia are you, by the way? Maybe if we trade backgrounds, the conversation could proceed more interestingly... My contacts are mostly through my wife, so I hear it from St. Petersburg, North Ossetia, Georgia, and the Ukraine, with a slightly over-representative Jewish tint. I am none of the aforenamed.
Please describe how Putin made Russia rich. It's like saying Stalin won 2nd world war. If Russia is richer, it's DESPITE having Putin and his KGB komrades at steering wheel.
Difficult assessment. The Soviet economy was collapsing when the soviet union broke up. It's hard to tell what Jelzin did right and wrong, especially compared to Putin.
What Putin certainly did was to turn Russia into an authoritarian state, run mostly by ex-KGB officers. What he didn't do was to make the society more open and retool and revitalize the economy. He also did hardly anything against corruption which didn't directly affect is ability to rule.
The problem here is, how do you expect any government to act differently in the future?
I am German as well and would like the same. But then you see that there are no real options for the replacement of CDU (Center-right) and SPD (Center-left). The only other voteable (is this a word?) parties regardless of opinion are Die Grünen (Greens), Die Linke (Left), FDP (Liberals).
Anything else and we are moving into extreme territory. Here's a list: [1]
Do you really believe AfD could form a sensible government that can act on an international scale? And what's left then? Fringe parties and extremists (and ou may very well count AfD as such to begin with).
So then we are left with a choice of new people from the same parties. Those are well established groups and collectives of human beings. People who make it to the top are well filtered and chosen. There are also there because their actions tend to be predictable and as a result reliable.
But this means that you will rarely get a real change going on if you just change people and not the parties.
Another far scarier scenario is that it doesn't matter who is in power. The scandal might only scratch the surface of the nature of the US-GER relationship. It is possible the German Federal Republic's foreign policy and actions are far more controlled and dictated by the US than is publicly known today. In this case, voting won't help to change that.
There are German politicians (Willy Brandt in particular comes to mind) who stepped down for far less than what Merkel and her government have done or at least have allowed to happen.
In a democracy, experience shouldn't be the standard by which to measure fitness for office. Experience in the law-making process, knowing the ropes of the political system and maintaining diplomatic standards: That's what members of lower ranks of political administration should be for (which for this very reason usually are appointed instead of elected). Politicians in leadership positions should be measured by their vision (or plan, to use a less high-flying term) for the country and integrity alone. Instead, most politicians in modern democracies have learned to navigate the political system and the media circus exceptionally well while integrity and ethics have been left behind.
Talking about political experience: Before Merkel became chancellor she was very inexperienced in international politics herself. As was Helmut Kohl, who was often underestimated by fellow state leaders (notably Margaret Thatcher) for his uncouth appearance and his perceived intellectual shortcomings. Both grew while in office with Kohl even managing the diplomatic masterpiece of the German reunion against all odds.
What's happening right now is just outrageous. German intelligence spying on German citizens and companies and selling that data to a supposed ally who in turn uses this data against Germany. Everybody responsible for this (including the chancellor) should step down and make way for a government that's willing to represent the interests of the people again instead of furthering their own agenda or catering for the interests of another country.
I see this less as corruption at the top myself and more as a number of internal problems systemic to the BND and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Germany's domestic intelligence service).
I am old enough to have seen a huge number of scandals coming out of the German intelligence services. I've seen Maihofer resign over the Traube affair and I've seen German intelligence snoop on privileged client-attorney communications and a lot of other bad stuff. The list of BND scandals is legion.
I would be happy to see resignations of any current and former Chief of the Chancellery involved in these schemes, pour décourager les autres. Let's be clear: the BND has pretty much intentionally broken several of the safeguards contained in the G10 Act, often with internal legal justifications that don't pass the giggle test (and would make only John Yoo proud). And the most recent revelations may mean they even committed crimes (conduction espionage for a foreign power, per §99 of the penal code, and economic espionage, per §17 of the law against unfair competition). This is plenty of reason for heads to roll. And sometimes, the tree of liberty has to be watered with the careers of intelligence service bureaucrats.
At the same time, even as an anti-fan of Angela Merkel's policies, I don't see what kicking her out of office would help (unless she had her fingers deeply in this particular pie). Intelligence services regular seem to aim at becoming a state within a state, and dismantling the power structures above them won't help; structuring safeguards so that they aren't as easily circumvented does. For example, in theory, the G10 commission (the watchdog appointed by the Bundestag) has broad control over what the intelligence services can do in terms of surveillance and can stop any and all surveillance measures at any time. In practice, however, that seems to have been circumvented by them not being told in the first place (or being deceived).
This is a good point really -- the BND seems to be exceptionally gaffe-prone. It seems the current BND president has to leave the office every few years over some affair or the other...
I can't understand your sentiment at all, especially when posting as "bayesianhorse". Don't you have any desire to change "your" country for the better? Do you really think Merkel is responsible for Germany's economic situation and the politicians of CDU/SPD are doing a better job than everyone else could?
Preserving everything as is like our government and Merkel does (just like Adenauer said: "Bewahrt das Bewährte") might work in the short term thanks to the strong economy and Schröder's reforms, but the complete lack of any idea or strong opinion about future challenges - always coupled with the way of least resistance - will come back and bite us.
I would go quite that far. But our political system is pretty much rigged to ensure that the government is fairly subservient to the USA.
Also, intelligence services, due to the secrecy in which they operate, have a tendency (to put it mildly) of developing an agenda of their own which may not always be aligned with the government's agenda.
The scary thing is, this headline does not even surprise me any more, it does not shock me, and it does not even make me angry. It is just another piece in a vast puzzle that adds to the overall picture but does not change it substantially.
"subservient" may be a bit too harsh a term. In history it was far more profitable to ally with the US than with any other superpower. That goes double because especially in the decades just after WWII nobody would trust Germany with enough weapons to defend itself, and so there really were only two choices: Ally with the US, or be swallowed by the Warsaw pact. They did have the invasion plans, by the way.
The U.S. wouldn't have let any country fall prey to the communists, so keeping Germany with “the west” was very much in their own interest. Hell, they used planes for years to keep even half a city (west Berlin) from falling to the communists. Your arguments don't convince me.
True, armed conflict would utterly devastate my homeland, but your statement is only partially true. And some form of devastation happened anyway, in mind of people living there. Results will be felt for generations.
The German government is between a rock and a hard place. The USA are our allies. We depend on them for our national security for all sorts of reasons. And the most pertinent risk is indeed global terrorism. Without the help of the US intelligence sources, we couldn't stop remotely as many terrorist cells.
So the government may have had two bad choices: Either risk to have a major terrorist attack happen on their watch, or cooperate with the US more closely than the public would want.
The government may not even have had that choice since a lot of the actual fault may lie in relatively low levels of the BND, and only the oversight was inadequate. (Like it is in the US even more so)
> And the most pertinent risk is indeed global terrorism.
I'm not sure what a "pertinent" risk is, but it's the most media-friendly. But compared to the consequences of climate change, or even the current economic crisis, it should really be downgraded. I don't have hard stats regarding the increase in suicides due to the crisis, but there is no way the number of terrorism-related deaths in Europe is even in the same ballpark.
> Without the help of the US intelligence sources, we couldn't stop remotely as many terrorist cells.
Really? How many is that exactly? The only country which seems to be regularly try new terrorists cells is the US, and the scenario seems to be the same every time: an FBI informer helped radicalize and provided weapons to some youths with lots of personal issues, which turns into another success of law enforcement.
It's similar to people being afraid of flying, and in the same time don't mind hitting highway in crappy old car. Things blowing with people inside/around just works much better with our primary instincts.
If you're clever enough, you can realize this and actively fight it, but you'll end up feeling alone and surrounded with bunch of idiots. No-win scenario.
They rejected 40,000 US requests that were deemed outside the co-operation agreement and have now discovered 2,000 which are "suspicious".
The article suggests the agreement excluded German and US organisations, the "suspicious" 2k were relating to other European institutions. It sounds like a case of it being within the written agreement but that the agreement was too broad, or at least should have been changed with the shift in political rhetoric.
I don't understand why this keeps getting reported like it's new news, or that Germans seem to keep forgetting this and "learning" about it again and again.
Remember who made the equipment Stuxnet targetted? Siemens.
When you export lots of specialized industrial equipment with potential use in military/nuclear tech, someone is probably monitoring you. Oversight is good for everybody.
But as soon as you argue in that direction someone from an agency, who wants to play with the big guys and their big toys, comes along and argues how America is critical for our security and how endangered we are and that Germany did not had a terrorist attack yet just because the mighty US of A guards us. If he is good at his job, he manages to slip in the Marshall Plan as well. People seem to believe this, even if they know, how our agencies fail to prevent (non-islamic) terrorism [0] and that it was in fact the police on its own that caught the attempted (islamic) bomber in Frankfurt last week [1].
[0]: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/16/german-neo-nazi...
[1]: http://news.yahoo.com/report-german-police-conduct-anti-terr...