Germany: We Think NSA May Have Tapped Chancellor Merkel's Cell Phone 267
cold fjord writes "According to a report in the Miami Herald, 'Chancellor Angela Merkel has called President Barack Obama after receiving information that U.S. intelligence may have targeted her mobile phone. Merkel spokesman Steffen Seibert said Merkel made clear in Wednesday's call that "she views such practices, if the indications are confirmed ... as completely unacceptable" and called for U.S. authorities to clarify the extent of surveillance in Germany.' Der Spiegel has some information on Germany's own "PRISM" project. White House spokesman Jay Carney said President Obama 'assured the chancellor that the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor' her communications. He didn't mention anything about past communications. This news follows allegations of U.S. surveillance of the Presidents of Mexico, and France. Yesterday the LA Times noted, 'French authorities are shocked — shocked — to learn that the American government is spying on French citizens. The Foreign Ministry summoned the U.S. ambassador to the Quai D'Orsay to inform him that what's going on is "unacceptable," and President Francois Hollande claimed to have issued a stern rebuke to President Obama in a phone conversation.' Up until now, Merkel had been reluctant to say anything bad about the U.S. over the NSA leaks."
The sad thing is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Shocking (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The USA isn't monitoring but what about.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps this is why Huawei equipment was banned, it didn't have the right backdoors for the NSA to monitor everything and they were unable to force the company to put them in.
THAT is probably the real security threat, the NSA could not spy as effectively.
Re:Shocking (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the NSA has has/had completely lost sight of the most important thing in politics: Don't piss off your friends. You are going to need them. Instead they hacked, sabotaged security and listened in wherever they found it possible. This also means there was no oversight of any kind that was in the least bit effective.
Quite frankly, the NSA is now basically a serious problem, and not part of any solution anymore. And that the the US administration proved this incompetent at controlling the NSA or may even have been cheering it on (as Rice reportedly did) has lost the US a tremendous amount of goodwill. Those that claimed the US administration is an amoral monster that does not understand the concept of "friend" seemed like crackpots before. Now it looks more and more that they might have had a point. Not good at all. The modern world needs team-players. Even a player as big as the US will eventually be left behind if they cannot manage that.
Re:Shocking (Score:5, Interesting)
The point you are all missing is that our intelligence service actually does not do that on allies. They have turned a blind eye to US activities in Germany and profited from the results, but try to understand that such spying activity you implicitly accuse German intelligence services is absolutely unthinkable.
That is not naivity from a German citizen, it is a complete misunderstanding about how my country ticks. We have a disgusting Government, just as you do. We have too uncontrolled intelligence agencies. We have some poverty.
But it is not comparable to your country. Our governments tried to be accepted back into the international community by behaving... better... than ever before since WW II. Another war is one of the greatest fears in my country. Kosovo was one thing, because it reminded people of our past. But even for Afghanistan, the chancellor had to threat the bundestag to resign if they did not vote for "unrestricted solidarity" with america. Not because the majority forgot what America has done for us, but because the fear of war has been implemented in the german conscious.
This is a really narrow description and there may be some Germans here describing other or contrary views, and they are valid. But this is not my mothers tongue, so I'll have to simplify a lot.
My point is: You really misunderstood the Germans if you accuse us of spying on our best allies. One does not do that as a good ally, so it would have been conpletely out of the question. No BND buerocrat or MAD soldier would dare to do that, because there would be some serious consequences like losing the job or at least let their career come to a full stop.
I know this sounds crazy to you, but even though I am a strong opponent to every party currently in the Bundestag, you should really try to understand the world better. The outrage is funded, but of course I disagree with the government about the real scandal.
The real scandal fo my government lies in the complete ignorance of "Mutti" when the information about mass surveillance on us all leaked (which is forbidden for our agencies, so they let yours do the job but did not publicly aknowledged the scale ogüf the programs, maybe even actuelly underestimated them). Mutti is outraged because she was spied upon. She did not even raise a finger against the mass surveillance on every German citizen.
My government is bad. But to campare their doings to the atrocities your governemnt did in recent years is unfounded. You still have the nobel prize in the western world for behaving like complete assholes. No, not every country is doing those things. Most of our intelligence agencies are boring beyond belief. And stupid. And blind on the right eye so they let the nazis kill "non-aryans" again, which is a scandal even if the numbers of our nazis today are comparable to other countries.
But mass-surveillance? On a smaller scale and I am talking about per cent, not absolute numbers. And spying on an american embassy or wiretaping members of the american government? You got to be kidding me. You really have no clue. UNTHINKABLE.
Again: This is no full scale political analysis of our politics, it is a very simple description on what is happening here.
And if I were you I would ask myself if it is in the best interest of my country to piss off every ally in the world and at the same time forcing us to boycott american service providers. Do you think I am the only one that is doing the shift away from every cloud remotely american and from any closed source product stemming from american companies? The suisse and SOME German providers are trustworthy. All american dataproducts must be considered to be compromised.
Defend the NSA activities all day long. You are entitled to. But honestly: Do you see me using Windows outside of a very strictly secured vm on a linux machine a year from now? Gaming kept me on windows, but the security risks exposed are too big. I might trust steam on a linux machine enough to let it run while I am playin
Re:Shocked (Score:5, Interesting)
You should get out of your country from time to time. Not trying, because that would be against our interest and the poltical will to be an accepted menber of the international community. The persons responsible for such an attempt would piss their pants if it ever came to light. No pension, no longer being a bureaucrat, no longer being paid more than the average citizen.
Our lame inelligence services trying a stunt like that? No fucking way.
Re:Quiz: Is the NSA Watching You? (Score:3, Interesting)
There's lots of proof, but you're not cleared to see it, and the use of warning letters specifically disallows you from talking about it after you've seen it.
(caveat: due to quirks in NATO regs I'm not bound by the same restrictions)
Re:I wonder what their real understanding is (Score:4, Interesting)
Those responsible in the NSA must have lost their minds completely and worked themselves into a mind-set where everybody is the enemy.
Yep. Everyone IS our enemy. We have completely lost our post-WWII advantage of being the only industrial power worth a damn. The world is catching up. If we want to maintain our "exceptionalism", we must consider every last nation a competitor. This means treating even our friends as rivals. It's pretty fucking stupid, but there it is.
Re:Shocking (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually it is considered unacceptable for allies to spy on each other's heads of state. Countries are not supposed to treat their friends this way.
On the subject of the French government's surprise, it isn't because French citizens are being spied on like the summary says. It is that there is mass surveillance of millions of French citizens by another friendly member of NATO.
Of course it's considered "unacceptable". Because the sheep (in this case, tech nerds) just love to lap up the righteous indignation of having their privacy violated, while simultaneously thinking wikileaks is the greatest thing ever (you know, the organization headed by the guy which decided there wasn't too much danger disclosing the names of allied informants in warzones in Afgahnistan and Iraq).
Meanwhile, anyone who can do it is doing it and those who can't are trying to.
Re:The sad thing is... (Score:3, Interesting)
(With the MIC already down to 4-5% of GDP from 9.3% in 1962? [heritage.org])
Defense spending has in no way been trending down, as your dishonestly trying to imply by comparing to GDP (yet again - like you have an agenda?) [slashdot.org]). I would draw your eye to the incredible graphic here [sipri.org] from the well regarded Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Just shy of an eye popping 700billion/year military spending by the US. Certainly off its historic highs during the good times high rolling 2008, but even the military could not live it up like it is pre-2008. Far more credible than your defense spending as % total budget outlays 1945–2013, which is like saying, "hey the overall budget is growing faster than our budget increases, so... [switch off cognitive functions], See!! The long term trend in defense spending is down!!". Muddled half-truths and nonsense indeed.
It is telling that you repeatedly reference the heritage foundation [wikipedia.org] "an American conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C." whose shining moment was its "leading role in the conservative movement during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, whose policies drew significantly from Heritage's policy study".