Germany And US Government's Agree Not To Spy On Each Other... But What About Their Citizens?

from the so-us-is-more-concerned-about-germany-than-its-own-people? dept

As a bunch of folks have been sending in, the US and Germany have announced that, in the wake of the various revelations about NSA surveillance (as well as surveillance efforts by other countries, including the UK and Germany), the US government and the German government are working on ironing out an agreement to not spy on each other -- apparently covering both government espionage and corporate espionage (done by intelligence services). Of course, it's not like any countries have spying agreements. Doing that kind of espionage is always "illegal" but it's done anyway. Does anyone think an agreement between the two countries would actually stop the spying? No chance. Even more hilarious, Germany is claiming that existing US spying is already "legal."

In the progress report, the German government found that U.S. intelligence services comply with German law. Also, the operators of large German Internet exchanges and the federal government did not find any evidence that the U.S. spies on Germans, the government said.

Yeah, okay. So, if that's true (and it's clearly not, given the fact that the NSA automatically is spying on pretty much any communication between Germany and the US by default), then this "no spying" arrangement is meaningless. If it's not true, then it just suggests that the US can continue doing the spying that it's doing and Germany will look the other way. This seems more like an announcement to make people in Germany think it's government is doing something in response to the stories of the NSA's activities.

But, back to a larger point: it seems somewhat ridiculous that President Obama has rushed to stop spying on Germany, while refusing to do anything to stop the surveillance of Americans themselves. While Obama claims that there's no domestic spying program, that's already been shown to be absolutely false.

So the message we get is that the US government will spy on Americans, lie about it, and when other countries act annoyed about more global spying, the US will actually pretend to stop that spying program... but the domestic spying will continue.

Filed Under: espionage, germany, no spying, surveillance, us