How Germany’s Surveillance Scandals Echo Our Own

http://www.thenation.com/article/how-germanys-surveillance-scandals-echo-our-own/

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How Germany’s Surveillance Scandals Echo Our Own

We treat the Germans the same way we treat ourselves—like dogs.

By  Norman Birnbaum

August 14th, 2015

Given the depth, elegance, and intelligence of our national political life, it is understandably difficult to find energy and time to consider what is happening in nations culturally and politically close to us. It is instructive, however, to consider an episode in Germany largely unreported in our media.
The German agency charged with domestic security is called the Office for the Defense of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz). It is attached to the interior ministry, but as with the other German intelligence agencies, its activities are supervised and monitored by the chancellor’s office. The agency has for some time been rather vigorously criticized in Parliament and the press for two major failures. One involves domestic neo-Nazi terror. Its agents penetrated and manipulated a right-wing terror gang—which was then responsible for murders. The agency, however, has stubbornly refused to make public its own responsibilities in the case. Secondly, after the Snowden revelations of activity by the US National Security Agency within Germany and the notorious case of the tapping of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone, the German agency has been loudly silent on what—if anything—it has undertaken to deal with the apparent impression of our own government that the Federal Republic can be treated as the fifty-first US state. http://www.thenation.com/article/how-germanys-surveillance-scandals-echo-our-own/