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 playing, because I could control which files its process can access. I could even enrypt those files or unmount the data drive alltogether while playing. But trusting windows enough even when I avoided viruses since one word macro stemming from CompuServe? No f...ing way.
Your country is unneccesarily making enemies by the minute. No, there won't be a war about the mass surveillance. But as I do not see the US bombing europeans into using compromised products, I do not find it wise to laugh so hard about stupid europeans who are outraged about the scale of your owellian schemes. Me buying a phone with a standard android? Or even another iSpy-product (having iPhone and iPad phoning directly to the NSA for the last few years is bad enough as it is, but the next products shure as hell will not contain another closed source OS or OSS that has not been analysed for problems, accidently placed there by the NSA.
You have a big deficit. Don't you think it would be more wise to treat your customers better instead of spitting them in the face repeatedly and muse about our naivity publicly on /. ? Yes, even most of us geeks did not expect the scale of your schemes. We did know about some spying and even about echolon. But the extend of the surveillance activities proved even some of our sceptical geeks wrong and proved the tin foil hats right. Let this sink in. Let us start to shift our friends and fanilies away from american companies while we are "fixing" there computers when the next virus hits. You know how that goes. Most machines have no problem hosting a windows machine in a vm when absolutely neccessary for some work. Most people do not care about their email providers as long as it collects the mails sent to their old address, slowly shifting to a more trustworthy email- and cloudprovider. posteo.de is having many new customers.
That is strange. Oh, wait, maybe not.
