Spying is a corner case. Every country spies on every other country. Do the Germans wiretap international communications? Absolutely: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesnachrichtendienst Have they ever spied on their own people? Even worse: their own journalists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesnachrichtendienst#Spying_...
The question is what "spying on other countries" actually looks like, and one of the legal barriers is that, well, if you're spying on Americans in America then you're not really spying on other countries at all, so let's make a rule that US citizens are exempt from NSA or CIA surveillance. Does this mean US citizens are exempt from being spied on? Of course not! That's what the FBI is for!
If there's a human right of "not being spied upon", it's violated by every country that spies. Germany is factually one of them.
I do not want to claim any kind of superiority – that is very clearly not the case. The German government consists of many, many people who do not respect privacy at all and are disgusting scumbags. No question about that.
I just want to say that from a moral point of view the statement that it’s ok that non-citizens have no right to privacy is totally bankrupt and idiotic.
IMHO something I deem immoral being legal and happening is actually worse than it "just" happening. It's adding insult to injury, if you will, and of course it makes it much more likely to happen again, or even more and more.
Link to video: http://youtu.be/Uulv4ve6RJ8
Skip to 45:00 and watch for a couple minutes if you're interested in hearing just that. Though if you have time I recommend watching the whole thing.
What I said was general, I wasn't thinking of anything in particular.. but thanks for that link, I will be sure to listen to it in full when I have time.
FWIW I do feel that American citizens should have to 'participate' just as much in these schemes as the rest of the world, if these schemes are to exist at all.
I suppose what I can't figure out is why the reaction is devoted solely at the U.S., when it seems Germany is the only major Western society that cares that deeply about it.
Wikipedia:
Nationalism is a belief, creed or political ideology that involves a voluntary accepted or coercively imposed mode of identification with individual persons and a nation.
George Orwell:
http://www.george-orwell.org/Notes_on_Nationalism/0.html
I'd say identifying with anything other than oneself is even bigger a delusion than identifying with oneself, and since it's so widespread, calling it a pest is actually polite.
I do think, though, that nation states are a fundamentally bad model for governance and both too large and too small. I’m not sure what could replace them (and not a fan of pre-nation governance models), though something like the EU can provide some (tiny and obviously deeply flawed) hints at how to approach the “too small” problem, I’m not so sure what to do about the “too large” problem.
You, as a US citizen, are most certainly protected from my government by the German constitution. Not when it comes to all basic rights in the constitution (only Germans have freedom of movement, freedom of labor and freedom of association), but most are universal and apply to every person.
The US constitution is out of date and simply wrong on this point. Human rights are universal and every human has them. Citizenship shouldn’t come into play. (I really hope that when it comes to freedom of movement, labor and association the limitation on Germans can also be lifted one day. For now the pest of nationalism lives on and makes lifting those limitations a practical impossibility. To me it seems clear that morally it is very wrong to have such limitations.)
Oh, and by the way, breaking moral rules is a hell of a good reason to raise outrage. I don’t understand why you seem to think that something being legal is reason to not be outraged.