1. Our intelligence agencies are not quite as accepted as those in France/UK/US. The general public has an unfavorable view, mostly due to history, but also due to more recent scandals. Mainstream newspapers are not afraid to create bad publicity for those services, unlike in most other countries.
2. There is currently a parliamentary investigation into the NSA scandal. Our government, which is complicit _and_ ideologically accepting of NSA spying is doing its best to drag its feet, but it still moves ahead. So far, it already has started raking up dirt on our own intelligence agencies.
3. Thirty years ago, Germany had two foreign intelligence services. One world-class service that had few rivals, ruthless and efficient, and one mediocre service, staffed by former Nazis. The mediocre service was the one of West Germany and is thus the one still in operation today. There are people in Germany today (some even in the parliament) that advocate the abolishment of our intelligence services on the grounds that they are an ineffective waste of money. I doubt that they will be completely abolished, even if the scandals here in Germany pile up higher, but it is not unlikely that they may have to face radical reform quite soon.
You are right that many people over here, especially within the startup scene, delude themselves about what our own services are doing. However, the average German techie has a relatively high chance of being educated on the true extent of the spying, because the CCC is reaching out in all directions to educate people, and is rather successful at that.
Because let's be honest. Most of us don't take the time to gather and mentally put in order all of the spy-scandal bits that have been published so far. We need some pre-digestion of the data and the CCC is doing that for us Germans. By now, even the German parliament is often inviting people from the CCC to explain the implications of cryptography and other technologies in parliamentary comittees.
EDIT: After re-reading my comment, I must say that it sounds a bit too much like "Hurrah for Germany". Objectively speaking, the German reaction to the spying scandal is rather subdued and our parliamentary control of intelligence services is laughable. It's just that the situation is worse in all other countries.
If you want to assert that among all the major western governments, Germany is among the best when it comes to data privacy, and is leagues better than the US, I'll agree.
Where we run into friction is when we try to extend that into saying that the German government is categorically less culpable for SIGINT than the USG. I do not believe that; in particular, I think "jurisdictional arbitrage" (if I might coin a term) profoundly implicates all the governments of Europe (and Russia as well).
It's hard to argue that a country isn't culpable for some other country's SIGINT when they are themselves a customer of that SIGINT.
Worse now, perhaps. But remember that Snowden's original point, immediately after the leaks became public but before he became so outspoken against the USG, was that he wasn't worried about controls on NSA per se. He was worried that the controls on NSA were mostly policy instead of law; mostly internal and non-transparent instead of external and public.
In his words, NSA was only a single Administration away from being a "turnkey tyranny". Isn't that true for Germany too, if parliamentary control is laughable? Just because Germany inherited a lousy foreign intelligence service doesn't mean anything about what they can do in the future. Honda and Hyundai both used to make some of the worst cars on the world market.
And my adopted UK is pretty much worst in class, with GCHQ proudly bragging they have less oversight than the NSA.
My problem is not that I think the NSA is doing more than everyone else wants to, but that they're doing more than everyone else have the capability to, and that it is profoundly dangerous:
Not because the NSA wants a "New World Order". I think they genuinely wants to do good. The problem is that wanting to do good and creating a machinery that makes abuses both today and in the future exceedingly easy can overlap substantially.
It never starts out with some cartoonish evil guy twiddling his cartoon-evil mustache and plotting to take over the world. It starts out with people who see themselves as good doing things they see as good and which probably mostly isn't being abused, and who are seeing good things come out of occasional small steps over the line.
And then the line moves. It starters with the creation of a "us vs them" group dynamic that lets you start to write of criticism as suspicious activity, because obviously you're on the side of good so why are people so critical?
Most of the worst dictatorships known to man came out of well-meaning groups wanting to do good.
This is why the uproar is warranted: Because we have the freedom to do so. Because we still have reason to believe that the people in charge is doing this not because they want to be evil, but because they think they're doing the right thing. Because it is vitally important to take the fight now, while it is possible to address this with peaceful, democratic means.
Because we don't want to wake up one day to find someone has decided that "doing good" has regressed to the state of the height of US interventionism, which is not more than a few decades in the past, and find another government has been overthrown because it didn't suit US interests, and another people suffering under a US friendly dictator as a result.
That is because they don't at the same extent that Americans.
First, although Europe's economy is bigger than the US when you consider all countries combined, each state has its own Security services. Being fractured means they are much less powerful than 50 billions a year NSA.
It also means they could decide what to share and what not with each other.
Second, they don't control tech companies like the US does thanks to the fascist(the State controlling all businesses) Patriot Act Laws. You have the option to collaborate with them or not without going to jail if you tell anybody.
Europe has the scars of similar fascist laws in Germany, Italy, Poland... and they are very careful abut them.
And Italy? Their former PM was convicted of wiretapping his political opponents and arranging to have transcripts published in the media, which he controlled.
Basically, the simplest response I can give to your comment is that I don't agree and don't believe this argument.
You are right that Germany is more limited in its capabilities than the NSA is.
But your belief about the limits of European surveillance presupposes that EU governments aren't colluding to pool their resources and circumvent their own statutory boundaries, when there is in fact evidence that this does happen.
Further: the aspects of NSA surveillance that seem to have people most up in arms are also not hugely expensive. The NSA's targeted exploit programs are not multi-billion-dollar investments. Can NSA decrypt things that the BND can't? Almost surely yes! But direct cryptanalysis attacks, the sort that are abetted by huge data centers in Utah or wherever, aren't the problem. What happens instead is that sovereign SIGINT services have organized to take advantage of latent Internet flaws.
So that giant data center in Utah isn't being turned against the American people? Maybe it could be demolished before it is used that way, and we could swap the NSA's budget for the BND's.
Taking away the NSA's money is the only way to trust that it's operations against Americans are curtailed.
No international company will host German users data in Germany. Germany has plenty of protections for citizens of other countries from being spied upon, but views it's own citizens as it's slaves.
IANAL, just a tech worker frustrated by what my lawyers are telling me.
Most European countries don't do mass surveillance. In my country there are two spy agencies, civilian and military one, and they both have less than 200 people working for them. their budgets are just too small for large scale spying.
> a government that has a track record of cooperation with SIGINT.
There is nothing wrong with cooperation and SIGINT. Spy agencies should spy and exchange information. It's the mass surveillance that is the most problematic aspect.
The reports are interesting reading. I'm not sure how accurate they are.
I am less concerned by GCHQ spying (they have huge caches but access to it is supposedly controlled and they have limited searches of it) than I am by the breaches of privacy that happen every day by local authorities.
London has more CCTV than anywhere else in the world (and probably more than some entire nations). This footage used to find its way onto TV shows - trashy clip compilations of burglars doing stupid things.
People who want to send their child to a particular school are spied on to make sure they live in the intake zone. (See also applicants for on-street parking permits; London congestion charge zone; etc etc)
There are very many people spying on citizens in the UK and most of them have more impact on day to day life than GCHQ, and are very poorly controlled in comparison to GCHQ.
This is not me saying that I think GCHQ are right to slurp all this data. I think it's a weird failure of oversight and of journalism. (GCHQ are specifically mentioned in many bits of relevant legislation as being excluded from that law.)
Of course they do not have the resources, the means or the opportunities to enact such global pervasive surveillance as the NSA is doing. Almost none of the other secret services even come close.
Some of them would love to if they could, but only the NSA is in that position (mostly due to so much bits of Internet traffic routing in some way or another through US servers).
Only the NSA is actually doing it to this extremely insane extent.
Think about that next time you're frustrated.
Of course I care about my own government spying on me. I care a hell of a load more about some other government (one that shouldn't have any business with my life) spying on the whole fucking planet. Is that so hard to understand??
As for the rest of your comment: I find it frustrating the extent to which Europeans seem to believe that their own governments aren't spying on them. Obviously, people in the UK have the weakest argument here (there's an argument that the UK's SIGINT programs are even more aggressive than those of the NSA), but the arguments for, say, Germany and France aren't that much stronger.
(Also: If there's a SIGINT conspiracy theory I do buy into, it's that every modern country in the world is culpable for SIGINT, because they leverage their partners for access to SIGINT that they cannot lawfully generate themselves, on a quid-pro-quo basis.)
You see this manifest itself all the time with supposed privacy startups launching from the "safe confines" of Switzerland, a government that has a track record of cooperation with SIGINT.
An assertion I believe to be true that would I think be helpful if more people understood: NSA surveillance --- however unwise much of it is, and I think there's a lot of unwise and unlawful stuff happening --- is not a secret effort to create a New World Order headed by the NSA. It's a means to an objective shared by most (if not all) of Europe. European companies don't cooperate with NSA because they're afraid of NSA; they cooperate because they have shared interests --- both in security (terrorists are a greater threat to Europe than to the US) and politically (China and Russia have as much if not more influence over the economies and geopolitical status of Europe as they do to the US).