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Probe Into NSA Activity Reveals Germany Spying On Germans
cold fjord writes The Local (DE) reports, "The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence service, spied on some citizens living abroad, a former lawyer for the spies told MPs on Thursday. Dr Stefan Burbaum ... said that some Germans were targeted as "office holders," a legal loophole the spies used to circumvent the law that protects Germans citizens from being spied on by its own intelligence agency. ... the German spies argue that a citizen working for a foreign company abroad is only protected in his private life, not in his professional communications ... "The office holder is the legal person," Burbaum said. ... "This construct of an office holder is just as absurd in practice as it appears in the law," Konstantin von Notz of the Green party said. Further, foreigners' communications conducted abroad are not protected, even if they are in contact with German people or work for a German company. MPs ... criticized the BND's ability to operate in a "lawless zone" when it came to spying on foreigners. ... the BND regularly retains traffic which it had not received specific permission to investigate which it collects during such trawls. In this way, access acquired under the "G10 law" becomes a "foot in the door" to otherwise closed-off sources of data, Burbaum said." The parliamentary investigation was initiated by reports that Chancellor Merkel's phone was being tapped by NSA, but later it was found that at least five countries were tapping Merkel's phone.
They (BND) created several new theories:
a) Space Theory: German law does not apply in space, so their satellites (or those from agencies of "friends") are not bound by the constitution.
b) Function Owner Theory: When someone is acting within his/her capacity as a function owner, he is no longer a person protected by the constitution.
c) The Meta Data Theory: Meta data does not contain privacy protected information.
Thanks to Snowden this mess came to light. This now needs to be cleaned up. All three approaches will be shot down, with or without the governments approval.ï
Most parliamentarians agree, that the intelligence services practically beg for a shorter leash. Power struggles and party politics will delay it, but they will get it.
A shame NSA is so determined to use the technology it has at its disposal to breach our privacy both personal and professional, wondering what they want to do with all that droves and droves of information they been collecting over the years, all in the name of National Security.
Private property is control, numbnuts. I am surrounded by a wealth of resources, natural and man-made, none of which I'm allowed anywhere near, nor am I allowed any say in the use of. Property's a coercive concept for everyone except the owner. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but that the whole rhetoric of market = freedom / democracy = control is laughably loaded.
Under social democracy, there are more resources and institutions under democratic control - particularly those guaranteeing a basic standard of dignified living for all humans, such as a national health service - which means I am more likely to be able to both make input and reap benefit.
(And I know you didn't actually mean "socialism", which is worker control of the means of production. Loads of successful businesses are cooperatively owned and democratically run already, and I can be almost certain that this hasn't impinged on your delicate American freedoms.)
The 'feature' is that this is treated as a nasty surprise, and somehow hypocritical or in poor taste. It's otherwise expected, or even exaggerated.
That said, the one huge change that has likely given generally-wealthy-and-developed-western-democracies a (probably temporary) massive boost in relative spying scariness is the move to electronic surveillance, and the move of the citizenry to electronic media and devices on which to spy.
When most intelligence gathering is human intelligence, or fairly low sophistication manual bugging/document theft/break-ins/etc. a visibly authoritarian system where secret police intimidation and coercion are routine, assorted invasive practices are fully legal or impunity is so strong that they might as well be, and so on, is most helpful for surveillance purposes.
When the intelligence gathering is electronic, you can get away with a much softer touch; but you need an extensively 'wired' citizenry in order to have something to spy on, and you need considerable amounts of technical expertise, money, and infrastructure.
While tech is just getting cheaper, and even absurdly squalid hellholes will probably have enough of it for a data-driven surveillance dystopia sooner or later, this did give a fairly massive relative bump in the spy power of 'nice' governments. Their attempts to replicate old-school Stasi stuff have been on smaller scales, and generally less effective(eg. NYPD vs. basically all the muslims in the eastern US, never mind that they are a municipal police force. The lawsuits they were many, the intelligence gains they were minimal, the whole thing was sort of an embarassment, and that was under the full power of the 9/11!!!! constitutional exception).
They've had much better luck taking advantage of the fact that a huge amount of the world's electronic activity flows through areas they have access to and, thanks to cheap consumer electronics, now a huge amount of the world's communication foreign and domestic, does as well.