As Germans feign outrage for the actions of the Five Eyes, specifically the UK and America, they rubber stamp the same style laws that amusingly, went into effect very recently:
Well the German supreme court declared these laws partly unconstitutional. In Austria the supreme court has still to decide.
Of course these laws should be abolished.
But these cases show an important difference: These laws while outrageous, were created transparently and published.
This enabled citizens to take actions against them, and hopefully at some point they will be abolished.
In the case of the NSA everything was covered by gag orders under the penalty of committing a felony. That is way more insidious.
And those laws were debated by Germans, about how much they should know about each other. If they had all truly decided that everyone should be open, and that they could vote it away later, then everything's good.
Having Americans spy on everyday Germans, that's completely different.
It's one thing for an American on the street to see a German and size him up to see if he's a threat. Does he have a weapon, is he of sound mind, etc. It's completely another to follow him home, peek through the windows, poke through his phone, computer, trash, and then say you're only defending yourself and that everyone does it. The level of intrusion is unreasonable.
The laws underlying those gag orders are also public, transparent, debated beforehand, etc.
The principle of the gag order comes from the implementation of the law. Obviously the public law itself allows gag orders, otherwise Google's lawyers would tell Google to go ahead and publish them. Gag orders have been around in America, at all levels of law enforcement and security, since waaaaay before all this.
The big defect is allowing long-duration (or even permanent) gag orders, and not just for the NSA-style stuff. There's been quite a few court cases where parties settle on something which is public-interest but the judge seals the whole damn case forever.
Yup. All this outrage is fabricated. This isn't country versus country. This is people versus the State, and the people have already lost. The german government is doing what it must to fool the people, yet again, into thinking their governments are representative.
Bread and circuses are far cheaper today than in ancient Rome. It doesn't take much.
This law didn't get rubber stamped. The first time the government passed the law, it was declared unconstitutional by the german Supreme Court, after Patrick Beyer, a member of the Pirate Party challenged it in court.
Now the government tries to change certain parts to pass it again. Patrick Beyer said he will challenge it again and chances are pretty good, that it will be declared unconstitutional again.
The author is part of the Green party directly fighting the law you mentioned. Also if you cannot see the difference between the law Germany passed and what the US is doing with PRISM, you seem to be on the wrong website ;)
You think the German intelligence bugs embassies of other countries (and the UNO ??) and has secret deals wiht Google, Apple etc.?? I highly doubt it, the ramifications would be too high in case it became public.
Anyhow, we are discussing US right now ... not Germany. (Check what ad hominem means :)
This is why, in this age of mass media and constant opinion, perception is the only thing that matters. The NSA has been doing this for years and other countries have too. Everyone suspected it, backhandedly inferred it. Now the outrage happens when the media takes him as a dark horse. It's unfortunate, but unless you're a scientist, that's the system we live in.
http://translate.google.de/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=_...
Forcing telecoms to keep data available for on demand searches of intensely personal citizens information.