Comment by PavlovsCat
12 years ago
> every single country out there that has a foreign policy and interests abroad behaves in this way to one extent or another.
I'm German, and I can't remember ever having heard such a distinction - that some things are okay when done to foreigners, but not when done to Germans - apart from neo-nazis.
Sure, who knows what the BND is up to. But "behaving this way" also includes rhetoric that is not just considered acceptable in polite company, but even uttered by state officials... and as I said, I can't recall a single example, so maybe enlighten me? Or are you just assuming?
Sure, who knows what the BND is up to.
Just a reminder:
"In an interview with Der Spiegel , Snowden claimed that the NSA provided German intelligence, with analysis tools to help the organisation monitor data flowing through Germany. “The NSA people are in bed together with the Germans,"” he told the magazine.
He added that the NSA’s foreign affairs directorate, which is responsible for relations with other countries, had set up a system whereby political leaders “could be insulated” from the backlash if spying became public and helped to play down how grievously they were “violating global privacy.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/nsa-in-bed-wi...
Sorry, I wasn't as clear as I wanted to be -- by "behaving this way," I had in mind the existence of government programs for surveillance and spying; not one-sided complaints on the part of citizens about such programs.
Well sure, people in positions of power pretty much equally suck everywhere, I think we can consider this as baseline. But I do find it disturbing that "American exceptionalism" seems to be rather widely accepted the US population, and that they're not even ashamed to express it, and that state officials implicitly or openly do the same. I have no doubt that some people in Germany harbour similar sentiments, but they're really at the fringes and in the dumps in comparison.
Also, scale still matters. Killing a person or slapping them in the face are both violence, but there is still a difference, otherwise we could just reduce all to "physical and chemical processess going on" and completely stop thinking. I don't believe for a second that Germany, or even France, Italy or Russia (which I consider rather right wing) have programs to scoop up traffic from Google's internal network in place. Maybe they would like to, but they can't pull it off. And while I wouldn't bet on it, I wouldn't be surprised if China doesn't either.
Really ? How about :
German soldiers abroad (say, in Afghanistan). Do they respect foreign law ? Of course not. Non-EU residents on German soil are subject to summary arrest and deportation (it's more complex than this, I know, but as summaries go you could do worse) German social security treats citizens, residents and illegal aliens vastly differently German domestic wiretapping laws are basically that the executive gets to spy on anyone on German soil without judicial oversight AND outside of Germany. While it's of course true that this is not a distinction, it's actually worse than US law. German wiretapping laws do not let companies evaluate the legality of a wiretapping order before complying, unlike US law. Telecom companies operating in Germany are forced to provide the government with an automated system that can wiretap anyone on their networks without even their technicians knowing about who/what is being wiretapped. Needless to say, these systems are in constant use, and have been expanded. Small detail : in the US, the government will at least pay companies appropriately (handsomely even) for costs related to wiretapping. In Germany (like most of the EU) companies have to comply, fund it themselves, and can't even look at the orders. Non-compliance with this is punishable under criminal law (meaning the CEO, techies, field techs, or anyone in the telco can be arrested if the company refuses to comply) The BND does not just have the right to spy on anyone, but it can summarily arrest anyone, intervene in any investigation without question (so they could, for example, kill someone, then take over the investigation, no questions asked). They can confiscate any goods, on German soil and outside of it, without so much as an explanation. They aren't even the only government department in Germany that has this power, the tax office has the same power.
As an EU citizen myself, I find the EU's "anger" at US spying somewhere between moronic and hypocritical. Especially France's is beyond all comparison, knowing that they just physically arrested someone for refusing to store all records of his customer's transmissions for a full year, entirely on his own dime. Furthermore, both France and Germany have used the information they force ISPs to spy for them to enforce copyrights. Neither country has any qualms about sending all citizen's internet traffic to a private organisation that is not answerable to the government at all, and is not even attempting to enforce criminal law (the NSA is at least doing this to prevent real crime, like 9/11. Germany and France are transmitting everyone's internet usage to an organisation so it could sue them for copyright infringement in an automated fashion. There's just no comparison)
Note that furthermore, in the EU, these practices have been voted in by a non-democratically elected government (the EU commission). So the EU can't even claim that parliament approved these measures, because they didn't (barring a few exceptions). This has been imposed by people negotiating "international treaties".
Can anyone please explain to me why, if there's outrage about the NSA, why isn't there 10x the outrage about EU practices ? The way it is makes absolutely no sense.
> Non-EU residents on German soil are subject to summary arrest and deportation
And where are the statements saying other countries shouldn't deport illegal aliens? My post asked about exceptionalism, openly stated, did it not?
> German domestic wiretapping laws are basically that the executive gets to spy on anyone on German soil without judicial oversight AND outside of Germany [..] The BND does not just have the right to spy on anyone, but it can summarily arrest anyone, intervene in any investigation without question (so they could, for example, kill someone, then take over the investigation, no questions asked). [..] Germany and France are transmitting everyone's internet usage to an organisation so it could sue them for copyright infringement in an automated fashion.
Uhhhh.... sources for all that please.
> Can anyone please explain to me why, if there's outrage about the NSA, why isn't there 10x the outrage about EU practices ?
Maybe the lack of abducting people and torturing them, or killing them with drones has something to do with it? And still, there isn't a month without demonstrations against some of the stuff you mentioned, like Vorratsdatenspeicherung. Other stuff is either flat out wrong or widely unknown, your posting of sources will decide that..
As for the torture thing :
http://strasbourgobservers.com/2010/07/06/389/
Given this article, I think it's safe to say that people get tortured to varying degrees by the German police on a weekly basis at least. Like the US, in the vast majority of cases the police do this for very good reasons.
As for a basic introduction to German wiretapping law:
https://www.privacyinternational.org/reports/germany/ii-surv...
Also you act surprised ? Why ? These laws are the "roughly" same across the EU. Generally a certain degree of violence, even what might be considered torture (but not outright "real" torture. Violence against an arrested person, ie. hitting them or so, even things like denying food/drink when it's not life threatening) is allowed in the EU to protect the institutions (parliament, government, ...) (but only for "existential" threats that threaten the institution itself, not just, say, the building), and to protect the lives of others.
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