Not at the Cost of Our Liberty

It’s been two years since Edward Snowden exposed the extent of the American intelligence community’s mania for data collection. Because of that, a cloud has hung over German-American relations for two years as well. All requests to the U.S. for an explanation have thus far been in vain.

Now it appears that trust of intelligence services has reached a new low point. There now comes the revelation that the National Security Agency in cooperation with its German counterpart, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND, has also engaged in spying on European industries and political leaders as well. That shows that all public protests have been ignored, and that control measures by parliamentary bodies have been running on empty.

It’s a depressing discovery and there is no indication that matters will get any better. When it comes to matters of security and matters of freedom, the governments in Washington and Berlin invariably come down on the side of security. No one wants to be accused of not doing everything possible to assure citizens are safe.

How little the United States government is willing to play a secondary role in the matter is documented in the email correspondence between Chancellor Merkel’s office and the White House, published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung over the weekend. What is noteworthy is America’s staunch opposition to the German government’s no-spy agreement and the almost submissive tone used by Merkel’s foreign policy negotiators in representing Germany’s wishes.

Those wishes were rebuffed by the Obama administration, and because the whole affair is embarrassing, the chancellor’s office released a statement saying that to the best of its knowledge, it had kept the public fully informed. Apparently there wasn’t a lot of information to impart.

Now it would be wrong to divide the world into unsuspecting German victims versus scheming American perpetrators, so to speak. The intelligence agencies of both nations have worked smoothly and routinely together for too long a time. The German government and BND have simply shown little curiosity about the sources of the intelligence supplied by the Americans or the methods they used to gather it.

And the BND itself provides information on a massive scale to the United States. Files received by this news organization show the German foreign intelligence branch gives 1.3 billion pieces of metadata per month to the NSA in a lively give and take operation.

Perpetrators and victims are also incorrect because in the United States, as here in Germany, a debate has begun as to what should be given to the intelligence agencies and what shouldn’t. On Thursday of last week, a New York appeals court declared a portion of the USA Patriot Act, passed in response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11 that allowed widespread telephone tapping by the NSA, to be illegal.

Reacting to the New York ruling, the number of senators and representatives advocating restriction of the uncontrolled collection of citizens’ private telephone data is on the rise. By next week, the House of Representatives wants to take up legislation for that purpose.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the New York lawsuit, has been campaigning for decades for civil rights in the United States. The ACLU is a shining star of American civic engagement and thus a natural ally of all those in Germany and Europe opposed to the concept of a police state.

The Atlantic doesn’t divide those who seek to preserve liberty in their societies. Those trenches mainly run in the U.S. as they do in Europe, between those spying fanatics driven by fear or megalomania and those who trust in democracy and transparency in government, the legal system and the watchful eye of an alert media.

Defending civil rights must remain a joint American-European duty.