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German Intelligence Agency Planning To Follow Big NSA Brother On Shoestring

Posted by timothy on from the ironie-und-sarcasmus dept.

An anonymous reader, tongue in cheek, writes"Facebook, Twitter, et al are tools for terrorists planning to do whatever terrorists do, Germany's BND has discovered. Inevitably, real-time monitoring of these sites is necessary and urgently required [original, in German], not least because that Snowden chap has shown we're running behind the U.S. and UK. And Spain. And Italy. In short, it's a national emergency — 300 million euros, presto please — and if we do this smartly, we could even get a sense of what the population outside Germany thinks. And while we're at it, why not throw in automated enemy face recognition too — and biometry and-and a program to deform the faces of our own spies' selfies, so the enemy cannot google them. Time to invest in national security startups."

7 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. Staatssicherheit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    German intelligence wants to know what people are thinking? It sounds like they are doing this for the security of the state, "Staatssicherheit".

    Again.

    1. Re:Staatssicherheit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Well, Homeland Security... just that name is chilling.

    2. Re:Staatssicherheit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Well, Homeland Security... just that name is chilling.

      You'd have thought that in 2001-2002 someone would have pointed that out to them. The optics of it are so goddamn Commie you couldn't have used that name in a 1980s/Cold War dystopian sci-fi movie without it being obvious that anyone who uses language like that is a Really Bad Guy.

      And yet they did. Right in front of us. While those of us who got the "joke" were called them on it. And it worked anyways.

  2. On the uselessness of spies by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's urgent to spend more money on collecting more data than we can analyze. The KGB won the spy war hands down, yet USSR lost the cold war hands down. That's how important spies are to national security.

    1. Re:On the uselessness of spies by greenbird · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The KGB won the spy war hands down, yet USSR lost the cold war hands down.

      Hmmm...I'm guessing you mean the KGB won the foreign espionage battle. Apparently they didn't do so good on the domestic espionage front or they would likely still be here. What it seems you don't understand is none of these programs have anything to do with foreign espionage or counter terrorism for that matter. They're all about domestic espionage, that is spying on and controlling dissent within your own population.

      --
      Who is John Galt?
  3. The difference with the USA by vikingpower · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...is that Germany is much closer to being a true and functioning democracy. I don't see how this would come through the Bundestag, the German parliament, without being at least watered down, viz. being quietly forced into starvation as soon as a left-leaning government comes into power.

    --
    Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
    1. Re:The difference with the USA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Of course the world revolves around the USA.

      For now.

      Ignorance feeds the thought that it's always been this way.

      Stupidity feeds the thought that it's sustainable.