Intelligence: Merkel's Cell Phone Isn't the Problem

The National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies are collecting all the data they can for the sake of security, and only democratically elected legislatures can put an end to their excesses. It’s high time they did so.

The problem is not actually Merkel’s cell phone, which the ultra-secret NSA (known colloquially as “Never Say Anything”) has allegedly tapped. Even Helmut Schmidt used to curse the Americans for listening in on all of his conversations during his term as chancellor. The NSA has allegedly wiretapped Merkel’s old cell phone number, which hasn’t been used in years.

The unsavory truth is, everyone spies on everyone — on enemies and on friends. Whenever the French complain about the “completely unacceptable” behavior of the Americans, they are forgetting the story Le Monde published in early July, which disclosed that their own intelligence agency DGSE does the same as the NSA — only more modestly, as befits a smaller power. But in France, too, social networks are being combed through, millions upon millions of emails and telephone conversations are being collected — and in fact stored — “on the edge of legality,” “beyond control” and for an “undefined period of time.”

The British agency GCHQ is also very industrious. Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, has its own listening station too, a forest of perfectly round white antennas near Bad Aibling that they took over after from the Americans after reunification. Unfortunately, Edward Snowden could not copy any Russian hard disks, but we would bet that post-totalitarian Moscow hasn’t been completely innocent either. The American agencies are simply larger, richer and better technically equipped.

Enormous Amounts of Data

The actual problem is these intelligence agencies, which seem to operate under the principle of “we do it because we can.” That’s what distinguishes them from the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century: the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the KGB, Gestapo, the SD branch of the SS and the Stasi. The Stasi still had to work hard to open envelopes or bug apartments — and do it all by hand. The totalitarian regimes of yesterday could not even dream of having the same capacities as today’s democratically appointed intelligence agencies.

The yield of Stasi and Co. is measured in the thousands — index cards, wiretap transcripts. In contrast, The New York Times reports that the NSA is building a metadata system that is in the position to store 20 billion “record events” each day and make them available to analysts within 60 minutes. In fact, that’s not only data of foreign nationals, but also of 320 million of their own citizens.

These are astronomical amounts of data, which are filtered through corresponding algorithms to reveal who knows whom, who travels with whom, who was where when. In the American constitution, which strictly protects civil liberties, there was no intention of such a surveillance state. Every Western constitution contains this sacred core: protection of the home and the right to postal and telephone privacy. And every Western intelligence agency that can is gnawing away at this core — systematically and with pleasure, all in the name of “national security.”

The indignant Germans — whose BDN has, by the way, been living off the fruit of its allies for decades — cannot win the war for civil liberties against the NSA, the French DGSE and the British GCHQ alone. This war must be won in the American Congress, in the British House of Commons, in the French National Assembly and in the German parliament. It requires the help of democratic citizens who are only beginning to understand that the enemy of their freedom comes from within — everything from intelligence agencies to social networks. From those that supposedly want to do the best for them.