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.
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.
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.
http://www.dw.de/airbus-to-press-charges-on-nsa-bnd-spying-c...
Airbus has both civilian and military development and production in Germany.
Is that more or less what has been going on?
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 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.
If the NSA doesn't care what the Germans think, why do they spy on them? ;-) [pun intended]
Seriously: The NSA really cares about the BND cooperating with them:
> http://www.danisch.de/blog/2015/04/23/der-bnd-und-die-nsa/ (in German, sorry)
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.
You still don't understand.
The NSA is here. In my country. With huge installations. Officially. Together with the CIA and US military.
Example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagger_Complex
We even paid partly for it(!).
Time for them to go home.
The German government is responsible for the presence of the NSA and it has the means to largely end NSA activities in Germany, but not the will.
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.
I highly doubt that as most German laws don't apply to US military stationed inside Germany (SOFA exemptions).
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...
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.
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.
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.
I have no doubt France's intelligence services are just as bad as NSA.
I would have been surprised pre-snowden. But after reading what he released and watching Citizen Four I wouldn't put anything past them at this point.
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.
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.
Scary as fuck for our privacy.
Germans are just starting to realize that they are as much a US poodle as the Brits across the pond.
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.
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.
Why is that necessary?
We live in a pretty miserable world if your only answer is "because everyone else is doing it".
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
The outrage is because they help the NSA spy on German politicians and companies, against the interests of Germany.
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.