For these reasons, the right to privacy is hardwired into the German constitution. Writing in the Guardian, John Lanchester noted that Germany’s legal history focused on carving out human rights: ‘In Europe and the US, the lines between the citizen and the state are based on an abstract conception of the individual’s rights, which is then framed in terms of what the state needs to do.’ (Britain’s common law, by contrast, is different and focused not on the existence of abstract rights but on remedying concrete ‘wrongs’.)
Germans have a visceral dislike of Big Brother-style surveillance; even today there are few CCTV cameras on the streets, unlike in the heavily monitored UK. Google met widespread resistance in 2010 to its Street View project; click yourself through a map of Germany and you’ll still find large areas pixelated. Germany published its first post-reunification census only in the summer of 2013 – previous ones in the 1980s were widely boycotted because people felt uncomfortable with giving the state their data.
The days of Adolf and the Erichs – Erich Mielke and Erich Honecker, the GDR’s communist boss – were over. Or that’s what most Germans thought. The NSA’s post-9/11 practices made the German constitution look like something of a bad joke. Snowden’s documents, dripped out in 2013, revealed that the NSA spies intensively on Germany, in many respects out-Stasi-ing the Stasi. For 10 years the agency even bugged the phone of German chancellor Angela Merkel, Europe’s most powerful politician. Merkel grew up in the GDR and had personal experience of living in a pervasive surveillance state. Of the agency’s many poor judgements this was perhaps the crassest: an act of spectacular folly.
The story began when the Hamburg-based news magazine Der Spiegel revealed that the NSA routinely harvests the communications of millions of Germans. In an average month it collects around half a billion phone calls, emails and text messages. On a normal day this includes 20 million telephone calls and 10 million internet exchanges. On Christmas Eve 2012 it collected about 13 million phone calls, the magazine reported. Sometimes the figures are higher. On 7 January 2013, the NSA had nearly 60 million communication connections under surveillance. This data was stored at Fort Meade.
In addition, the NSA carried out a sophisticated campaign of state-on-state espionage against foreign diplomatic missions in the US. Bugging the Chinese and the Russians was explicable. They were ideological adversaries. But the NSA also spied on friendly embassies – 38 of them, according to a leaked September 2010 file. Targets included the EU missions and the French, Italian and Greek embassies, as well as several other American allies, including Japan, Mexico, South Korea, India and Turkey.
The agency’s spying methods were extraordinary. It placed bugs in electronic communications gear, tapped cables, and collected transmissions using specialised antennae. Under a program codenamed DROPMIRE, the NSA put a bug in the fax machine at the EU’s office in Washington. It also targeted the EU’s Justus Lipsius building in the Belgian capital Brussels, a venue for top-level summits and ministerial get-togethers.
Germany and France were close US allies and NATO members. Their governments shared values, interests, strategic obligations. German and American soldiers had fought and died together in Afghanistan. As far as the NSA was concerned, however, France and Germany were fair game. Neither country was a member of Five Eyes, the exclusive Anglophone spy club. Instead they were ‘third-party foreign partners’. An internal NSA power point says bluntly: ‘We can, and often do, target the signals of most third-party foreign partners.’ According to BOUNDLESS INFORMANT, Germany is in the same top category in terms of level of US snooping as China, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
By the time Barack Obama visited Berlin in June 2013 the NSA row was straining US–German ties. In the wake of the revelations, German commentators likened the NSA to the Gestapo. The comparison was overblown. But the disquiet in Germany triggered by Snowden’s disclosures was real enough.
Obama and Merkel held a press conference in the chancellor’s washing machine-shaped office in Berlin. It was a short but historically resonant walk to the Reichstag, with its transparent Norman Foster dome, and to the Brandenburg Gate. The NSA revelations dominated the agenda.
Obama sought to reassure. He described himself as a critic of his predecessor. He said he came in with a ‘healthy scepticism’ towards the US intelligence community. After closer inspection, however, he felt its surveillance programs struck the ‘appropriate balance’ between security and civil rights. The NSA focused ‘very narrowly’ on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction: ‘This is not a situation in which we are rifling through the ordinary emails of German citizens or American citizens or French citizens, or anyone else.’ Obama insisted the system was ‘narrowly circumscribed’. It had saved lives, including German ones.
Merkel was unconvinced. She acknowledged that intelligence-sharing with the US had helped prevent an Islamist terrorist plot in Germany’s Sauerland region in 2007. Nonetheless, Germans were worried: ‘People have concerns precisely about there having possibly been some kind of across-the-board gathering of information.’
In an interview with the Guardian and other European newspapers, Merkel was scathing. She described the spying scandal as ‘extremely serious’: ‘Using bugs to listen in on friends in our embassies and EU representatives is not on. The cold war is over. There is no doubt whatsoever that the fight against terrorism is essential… but nor is there any doubt that things have to be kept proportionate.’
Still, it appeared that Merkel was keen to avoid a full-scale confrontation, her legendary pragmatism once more to the fore. Meanwhile, Der Shitstorm billowed across Germany’s media, in print and online. Generally, the tone was alarmed. The German sage Hans-Magnus Enzensberger referred to the ‘transition to a post-democratic society’. Hans-Peter Uhl, a staunch conservative, called the scandal a ‘wake-up call’. Even the right-wing Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was worried. Publishing the Snowden files was crucial if freedom were ‘to exist in the future’, it said.
Nevertheless Merkel chose to downplay the topic in the run-up to Germany’s September 2013 general election, while the opposition Social Democrats (SPD) tried to big it up. The SPD’s strategy backfired when it emerged Gerhard Schröder, the party’s former chancellor, had approved a wide-ranging intelligence-sharing agreement with the US back in 2002.
It was left to ordinary Germans to make a noise. Hundreds took to the streets and waved placards with anti-surveillance slogans; others heckled Merkel’s election rallies and blew vuvuzelas. In Berlin, one group wearing Snowden masks gathered in the Tiergarten, next to the classical victory column, where presidential hopeful Obama had made a memorable foreign policy speech in 2008. Participants held banners which read ‘Nobama’, ‘1984 is Now’ and ‘Those who sacrifice freedom and security deserve neither’. Down the road, along Unter den Linden, diggers were busy rebuilding a neo-classical palace on the spot where the communist Palace of the Republic once stood, an emblem of communist dictatorship.
By the time of the election most of the earlier indignation had ebbed away. Roland Pofalla, Merkel’s chief of staff, declared the NSA affair ‘over’. Merkel breezed to a third straight victory with an increased majority. The new and insurgent Pirate Party – which had done well in regional elections and campaigned on data protection – slumped to 2.2 per cent in the polls. It failed to enter parliament. Der Spiegel captured this debacle with the headline ‘Calm instead of Shitstorm’.