Spied-upon Germans are not mollified

The Americans “lied to us,” said Hans Leyendecker and Georg Mascolo in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. In the wake of the revelations last year that the NSA not only vacuumed up the communications data of millions of Germans, but also tapped the personal cellphone of Chancellor Angela Merkel, relations between Germany and the U.S. have been at an all-time low. Over the past few weeks, the two sides were supposed to be working on a “no spy” agreement to repair the friendship, but now even that has fallen apart. The Americans won’t reveal what they stole, insist on their continued right to spy, and “will not even make a commitment to refrain from snooping on German government and political officials in the future.” In an interview with ZDF television, President Obama promised only that the U.S. would not listen in on Merkel “as long as I am president,” freeing up his successors to resume the outrage.

Obama’s speech last week detailing “so-called reforms” of the spy program was a farce, said Damir Fras in the Berliner Zeitung. Maybe Americans are satisfied that a U.S. court will get to judge whether their emails should be read, but “for the rest of the world, that’s not reassuring.” Obama made clear “how little interest he has in the privacy concerns of allies.” The German government’s complacency in the face of such crimes is baffling and infuriating, said Günter Bannas in theFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “All the world knows what happened, and the American president confirmed it himself: violations of German law, the tapping of the chancellor’s cellphone.” For the German attorney general, though, apparently there’s not enough evidence to warrant a criminal investigation. Translation: Airing the truth about exactly how our leader’s privacy was compromised isn’t worth embarrassing our ally.

Or is the government concerned that its own complicity would be revealed? asked Wolfgang Gast in Die Tageszeitung. A parliamentary inquiry, at least, is coming, and it will have to determine how closely our own Federal Intelligence Service was cooperating with the NSA. Remember, when whistleblower Edward Snowden’s information came to light last year, German officials rushed to Washington to demand answers, then came back and assured us all that there was no scandal and the media were exaggerating. Only after we realized that Merkel’s personal phone was tapped did the German government “make a U-turn and denounce” the program. Is that because, as Snowden’s documents imply, there was “an agreement under which Germany collected the data and made it available” to the U.S.?

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The truth is, in the realm of information technology, Germany— and indeed all of Europe—are merely “a kind of colony of the U.S.,” dependent on the overlord for know-how, said Reinhard Müller in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Our data currently sits on American servers, easily harvested by U.S. spies. If we want to protect it, we must develop our own IT capabilities. “Rather than whining about the power” of the Americans, we colonists must declare independence.