Slashdot Mirror
German Vice Chancellor: the US Threatened Us Over Snowden
siddesu sends this report from The Intercept:
German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said this week in Homburg that the U.S. government threatened to cease sharing intelligence with Germany if Berlin offered asylum to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden or otherwise arranged for him to travel to that country. 'They told us they would stop notifying us of plots and other intelligence matters,' Gabriel said.
You cannot implicitly denounce invasive intelligence while enjoying its ill-gotten fruits.
Without getting into the moral implications of such a threat by the US, this is the cost Germany et. al. pay when letting the US foot the defense bill. The US defense budget pays for a large portion of the defense of the first world. If they don't want to be beholden to the whims of the US, don't depend on the US for defense.
By trying to prevent its allies from giving Snowden asylum, the USA has forced him to take asylum with a relatively unfriendly nation, Russia.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
they aren't outsourcing it, the situation with defense was forced upon them, and who wants a fully armed german military? Europe burned down twice because of that.
who, this germany?:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/paral...
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
americans are and should be angry at the NSA
but other countries complaining about the NSA is hypocrisy
if i was german, would i be worried about the NSA? or the BND and the BfV?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
if you live in a country outside the USA, and your biggest privacy concern is the NSA, you're a moron: your own country is doing everything the NSA is doing, and in many countries, far worse. obviously, they can also abuse you a lot easier than the USA can. and they do
again: i don't have a problem with americans complaining about the NSA. americans SHOULD complain about the NSA. but i do have a problem with other countries complaining about the NSA when they do the same or worse
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It does confirm one thing: the US intelligence agencies aren't "the good guys". The good guys wouldn't condemn Germany to suffer otherwise preventable terrorist attacks for spite. Thanks to Germany for confirming this and making it known to all.
In Canada there is huge pressure from the US for us to pass bill C-51 which might as well be called Orwell's law. There is endless talk about this country being dangerous or that country. But it seems to me there is exactly one country on this planet that is causing problems for just about every democracy or not.
What I love about these tools that think that they should be able to spy on us to "protect" us. Yet in Canada we have a motorcycle gang that all wear special clothing, have special tattoos, and hang out in known HQs; yet our national police force can't shut them down with every law needed already in place. Prisons which have pretty well no constitutional protections for privacy or intercepted communications are filled with drugs. So even if they manage to completely remove privacy and rights they have proven themselves incompetent at doing their jobs with simplistic criminals.
What hope do they have against actual terrorists with an IQ over 90? Or lone wolves who communicate with exactly nobody?
My assessment of all these laws is that they are there to protect vested interests. The politicians want to protect their friends in big business in the name of national security/stability. But my guess is that they mostly want to protect themselves from the erosion of power that is happening through the internet where the press and other investigators can find out what corruption is happening. Thus the ideal situation is that whistleblowers will be nervous about contacting the press because they don't know if their communications are secure. That even politicians will be nervous about trying to reduce the power of the security services because not only might they be listening but that the security services will be well placed to leak data about they or their friends.
Remember that this sort of power is very insidious. For instance when the government goes to appoint someone to a watchdog or judicial position that will oversee the security services the security service does a "background check" this is not only to make sure that the person isn't an enemy spy but to protect the politicians from embarrassment if it turns out that their potential appointee is unsavoury in some way. This could be something like anti women views or even something like they are 60 and often date 20 somethings. Thus if the person is going to a hanging judge and is happy to give the security service free reign they can give the person a clean bill of health during the "background check" but if the person has long been a defender of privacy and generally anti authoritarian then they will compile a list of rumours and innuendos that suggest the person will be an embarrassment.
Thus as we hear about judge after judge giving their blessings to insanely unconstitutional behaviour, and we hear about watchdogs that aren't watching keep in mind about who vetted these people in the first place.
What scares the shit out of these people is when they don't have control over them as in the case of politicians in other countries. This is where they have to play hardball. But my simple question is how many politicians in various G7 countries have had information "leaked" about them by the US security services? Leaked during elections where they were successfully running against right wing hardliners that the US would prefer to win?
Umm, Germany has the eighth largest military in the world. Or were you unaware of that?
Japan has the ninth, in case you were interested.
Aside from the Big Three (US, Russia, China), Germany is behind India, UK, France, and South Korea. Which puts them about where they were in 1939 (what, you didn't know that the Wehrmacht in 1939 was smaller than the French Army, much less the combined Anglo-French forces they faced in 1940?).
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The need for that imposition died of old age roughly 15 years ago.
The only reason Germany ran wild twice was because we (the victors of WWI) botched the unholy shit out of things the first time, basically wrecking Germany and creating a power vacuum.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
There are whisteblower protection laws that permit one to claim as a defense "yes, I did the act but it was justified because..." and if the jury believes the reasons to be justifiable, there's no crime and therefore no conviction.
However, matters of national security are specifically excluded from the whistleblower protection law. So he would not be allowed to argue, at all, that his actions were justifiable. If his lawyer tries to argue Snowden was justified, "objection, irrelevant." And it would be.
This is the problem with the "well, if he's such a patriot, he should come back and stand trial and let a jury of his peers decide if what he did was good!" He is literally not allowed to argue that what he did was good.
Without preconditions, the one and only chance he would have is, as the Coward notes, jury nullification. But, they would have to arrive at the decision to nullify essentially on their own, because Snowden would not be allowed to argue that his actions were justifiable, thereby making the case for nullification.
Now, he could have a fair trial with the condition that he's exempt from the prohibition on use of a justification defense in the case of national security. IANAL, but I imagine that would require an act of congress, passing an amnesty law, as I don't think the executive or judicial branches have the authority to make the necessary agreement.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The only reason Germany ran wild twice was because we (the victors of WWI) botched the unholy shit out of things the first time, basically wrecking Germany and creating a power vacuum.
I'd say it was a bit more complicated than that. The issues were not Germany's alone, nor that of the losers, nor even the occurance of the Great Depression. The entire 20's and 30's was a three way battle between the idealogies and factions of Democracy, Fascism, and Communism. Italy, Spain, Austria, and Germany fell to fasicsm before WW2 even started.Before they did, there was a see-saw battle in the streets. The foundations of the Nazi party gained prestige when they helped overthrown a communist coup in Bavaria. There was even debate in the US along those idealogical lines.