Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
United States Government Privacy Security The Courts United Kingdom

Germany Won't Prosecute NSA, But Bloggers 111

Posted by samzenpus from the who's-to-blame dept.
tmk writes: Despite plenty of evidence that the U.S. spied on German top government officials, German Federal Prosecutor General Harald Range has declined to investigate any wrongdoings of the secret services of allied nations like the NSA or the British GCHQ. But after plans of the German secret service "Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz" to gain some cyper spy capabilities like the NSA were revealed by the blog netzpolitik.org, Hange started an official investigation against the bloggers and their sources. They are now being probed for possible treason charges.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Germany Won't Prosecute NSA, But Bloggers More

Germany Won't Prosecute NSA, But Bloggers

Comments Filter:

  • Ever heard of the Stasi prosecuting KGB? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Taco Cowboy ( 5327 ) on Friday July 31, 2015 @02:10AM (#50220901) Journal

    The Stasi could never gather enough guts to prosecute the KGB, what makes you think the current government of Germany - essentially a lapdog for Uncle Sam - would prosecute NSA?

    • Re:Ever heard of the Stasi prosecuting KGB? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by aaaaaaargh! ( 1150173 ) on Friday July 31, 2015 @02:35AM (#50220991)

      Well, the German BND was directly funded by Nazis under US oversight and the German Verfassungsschutz (counterintelligence agency) was pretty much directly involved in the recent right-wing radical NSU serial killings, so it's hardly surprising that they don't give a fuck about privacy (or democracy, for what it's worth).

    • Re:Ever heard of the Stasi prosecuting KGB? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31, 2015 @03:28AM (#50221165)

      Funnily though, the stasi did prosecute the NSA, it had intelligence about it. After unification, the originals of the documents were flown to the USA.
      http://www.microsofttranslator... [microsofttranslator.com]

      The STASI officials destroyed the proof of their crimes during their last days in office, the west german government destroyed the proof of the NSA's crimes afterwards.

  • So much stupid (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The first line of the article:

    "Germany's federal prosecutors are investigating whether a website has committed treason."

    A website is just a tool. A person - human being - committed this act, not an inanimate object. How do these writers make it to mainstream media.

    • Re:So much stupid (Score:5, Interesting)

      by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Friday July 31, 2015 @02:27AM (#50220963) Homepage Journal

      How do these writers make it to mainstream media.

      Uh, that's a skill required in mainstream media. "The Officer's pistol discharged." Obfuscate and decline to the passive voice. Don't rock the boat and always demur to power. Keep the corporation highly profitable.

      It's indy media that says, "yet another cop shot an innocent fucking black man in the head," not establishment.

      • Re: So much stupid (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ravenshrike ( 808508 ) on Friday July 31, 2015 @02:47AM (#50221043)

        Which just goes to show a lot of indie media is composed of fucking retards. Using murder rate of population as a metric for danger to cops, in death by cop whites are overrepresented and latinos and blacks are underrepresented. The only reason you don't hear anything from either the whites or latinos about it is because they don't whine about it like toddlers having a tantrum for not having their favorite toy.

        http://www.washingtontimes.com... [washingtontimes.com]

        • Re: So much stupid (Score:5, Informative)

          by pla ( 258480 ) on Friday July 31, 2015 @04:09AM (#50221315) Journal
          Which just goes to show a lot of indie media is composed of fucking retards

          It really doesn't fucking matter whether talking about a black or a white or a hispanic or an asian getting shot in the back by a cop, the "officer's pistol" didn't magically "discharge". The cop murdered a non-threat, plain and simple.

          And never mind the recent rash of suicides for traffic violations - I have to give them credit, that takes their disdain for the general population to a new low. They couldn't get much more blunt about how the feel about us short of literally pissing on us at every traffic stop. "Don't worry, I've marked you, the next one will pass you by".

        • Re: So much stupid (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Halo1 ( 136547 ) on Friday July 31, 2015 @04:36AM (#50221423)

          Using murder rate of population as a metric for danger to cops, in death by cop whites are overrepresented and latinos and blacks are underrepresented.

          Did you read the entire article till the end? It concludes with

          “The odds that a black man will be shot and killed by a police officer is about 1 in 60,000. For a white man those odds are 1 in 200,000.”

          In absolute numbers, more white people are shot by police than black people, but the former also make up a significantly larger chunk of the population (63% white vs 12% black). What I find disturbing about the guy presenting those numbers is that he thinks those are very low chances, while I think that both are way too high.

          The insets in the article pointing to "PHOTOS: 21 best guns for home protection" and "PHOTOS: Bang for your buck: Best handguns under $500" are also rather surreal to me in that context (but that's probably just me).

          • In absolute numbers, more white people are shot by police than black people, but the former also make up a significantly larger chunk of the population (63% white vs 12% black).

            But if you're going to make everyone look at it through the lens of skin pigment, then you also have to do what the producer of those statistics did: take into account the demographics surrounding high crime rates. Police shootings rarely, rarely occur outside the context of the cops interacting with someone in the middle of a violent or headed-towards-violent situation. Though the media is focused on things like that idiot campus cop who shot the guy trying to speed away from a traffic stop, that's NOT th

            • Re: So much stupid (Score:4, Insightful)

              by Halo1 ( 136547 ) on Friday July 31, 2015 @06:58AM (#50221979)

              I was just challenging a completely unsupported conclusion of someone trying to make people look through that skin colour lens.

              Of course you have to look at the wider picture, and of course the cases of unjustified police violence garner the most public attention. Given that even when looking only at unarmed victims getting shot, black people appear to be 3 times as likely to be a victim as white people, your '"they end up having to use force" may rather be "they end up using force" though. And you also have to widen the picture even further, looking at why those particular neighbourhoods suffer so much from those issues in the first place, etc.

            • Correlation does not imply causation.

              As it happens there is a well documented pattern that police seems to have forgotten in the past few years and which almost certainly is at play here - and could turn your conclusion on it's head.
              That pattern is called "escalation'. If the cops start carrying shotcuns, criminals start carrying machine guns.
              If the cops start driving tanks, the criminals will get bazookas.

              So it's quite possible that the causality was the other way around. Racist cops in black neighborhoods

              • your conclusion is wrong because your premise is wrong. they have lower gun violence because they have less guns... disarm everyone and youll have a lot less shootings across the board. cops will be a lot less twitchy, and they'll have the luxury of deciding whether toting around fire arms is worth it.

                disarming street cops... sounds like a great way to get a lot of cops killed.

                your first step would be to confiscate all firearms from the populous. short of that i don't see there being a solution.

                • You are relying on your intuition. I stated facts. Science beats intuition. Reality is usually counterintuitive.
                  Giving cops guns increase the odds of them dying because of escalation.
                  He'll here in my country the number one reason criminals kill cops is not to avoid arrest: it's to steal the cop's guns. That's what happens when you disarm the people but arm the cops: they get their throats slit from behind to steal their guns for robbing banks with.
                  He'll we have actually had people robbing police stations

                  • escalation is not a fact. it's your interpretation of the facts.

                    don't your beat cops have partners? you've gotta get some laws on the book that bring down the full weight of the criminal justice system on a cop killer.

                    http://nypost.com/2014/10/31/a... [nypost.com]

                    they estimate they spent 10 million over the course of a 48 day manhunt.

                    you have facts, many facts, but your interpretations of them are, in my opinion, wrong.

                    • 10 million US ? You realize that's our entire military budhet ? And we have the biggest and best equipped military on the continent. Not everybody is as rich as America.
                      Yes our cops have partners but we basically don't even have beat cops anymore. Those cops we're mostly killed in their cars.
                      While knife killings happen its more common that they are shot though. A good shot can get turn one gun into three for the price of two bullets if he isn't afraid to kill cops.

                      That said things have gotten much better o

                  • > In countries where most street cops mostly carry non-lethal ordinance (like nightsticks) only,
                    > and the guns only come out when you ALREADY CONFIRMED the suspect you're about to
                    > go after is likely to be armed - police hardly ever get shot, crime rates are low

                    How does this relate to what you said earlier in your posting:
                    > Correlation does not imply causation

                  • here in my country the number one reason criminals kill cops is not to avoid arrest: it's to steal the cop's guns

                    In US, a criminal wouldn't do it because there's no point. If you want to steal a gun, just break into a random house while the owners aren't there, you have basically a 1 out of 3 chance that it'll have at least one.

              • The UK averages less cop shootings in a decade than the US does in a year

                As much as I think that there's a gun problem that leads to shootings, I've got to ask the obvious question: How many officers are there in the UK versus the US? If there are 10 times as many officers in the US than in the UK, simple math would indicate that it would take 10 years for the UK to amass as many cop shootings as the US. If there are 100 times less police in the UK than in the US, then the UK's per-cop shooting rate woul

                • And how does it change your figures if I tell you that it's beeb more than 2 years since tge last time a cop killed a citizen in the UK? Gaps that long and longer are not uncommon at all. Cops without guns are not able to shoot people.

                  Oh and they disarmed the police decades before they instituted gun control. Turns out most criminals are reticent to shoot unarmed cops. Why risk life in prison for murder when you can try to avoid arrest risking only resisting charges ? But an armed cop invites gun fire just

              • You can't just compare the US to a tiny homogenous island like Iceland, or several other countries for that matter. Apples to Oranges. Disarm cops in the US and they'll be simply be ignored and ineffective at best, and/or shot en masse by the gang members that have infiltrated nearly every state in the union and every city: Bloods, Crips, Latin Kings, MS-13, the various mafias..etc.. Gangs have guns not just to fight cops, but each other, so they'll still have and use their guns, they most powerful they c

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by Cyberax ( 705495 )
                  So you're saying that even with uber-militarized police nothing can be done about gangs? Probably, next you'll advocate arming police with strategic nuclear weapons.
                  • I said there aren't enough SWAT teams around to all handle the gangs, not that "nothing" could be done. Additionally it would be inefficient and ineffective for them to mobilize everytime gang violence erupted anyway, street gang violence is not like a bank holdup or house hostage situation, or a sniper, which are more static situations. Regular police patrol out in the street, ready to interact with a sudden fluid situation; SWAT does not. By the time SWAT got there, they'd have scattered like cockroaches

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by Cyberax ( 705495 )

                      I said there aren't enough SWAT teams around to all handle the gangs

                      So right now all SWAT teams are at 24/7 utilization, barely having time to sleep and eat?

                      BS.

                      A typical SWAT team is deployed less than once a week. That's a reason why we have increased cases of excessive force used - the idle SWAT teams just make it too easy to over-react.

                      By the time SWAT got there, they'd have scattered like cockroaches.

                      Another BS.

                    • Not BS. It's realism. You know nothing about police operations, nor street gangs.

                  • So you're saying that even with uber-militarized police nothing can be done about gangs?

                    Of course something can be done. But it's politically incorrect to do so. The most violent gangs are thick with illegal aliens from Central America. The leftier side of US politics really wants to be able to take legal Latino votes for granted. So they angle for policies that do everything possible to avoid ruffling feathers in that area ... including giving sanctuary to people who end up being enforcers for MS13, etc.

                    To deal with gangs like that, you have to actually arrest people and then once they're

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by Cyberax ( 705495 )

                      Of course something can be done. But it's politically incorrect to do so. The most violent gangs are thick with illegal aliens from Central America.

                      That's actually not true. The most violent gangs (how do you measure that, btw?) are made from local citizens. Chiefly out of 'ghetto' neighborhoods.

          • Did you read the entire article till the end? It concludes with

            Did you? How come you chose not to quote the sentence and two more paragraphs right after that? From the article:

            But also adjusted to take into account the racial breakdown in violent crime, the data actually show that police are less likely to kill black suspects than white ones. “If one adjusts for the racial disparity in the homicide rate or the rate at which police are feloniously killed, whites are actually more likely to be killed by police than blacks,” said Mr. Moskos, a former Baltimore cop and author of the book “Cop in the Hood.” “Adjusted for the homicide rate, whites are 1.7 times more likely than blacks die at the hands of police,” he said. “Adjusted for the racial disparity at which police are feloniously killed, whites are 1.3 times more likely than blacks to die at the hands of police.”

            I'm not saying that the person quoted in the article is right or wrong; I haven't verified his data, and I don't know that anybody else has either. But the issue is not nearly as cut-and-dry as your carefully edited quote tries to make it appear.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Derail discussion on state secret police apparatus with more thinly veiled identity politics. Stay classy shills.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Hey everyone! We finally found Donald Trump's Slashdot account!

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        "White Hispanic" comes to mind. Keep the news highly profitable. Keep the clicks coming, keep the views growing.

        Thank you, NBC, for what anyone with at least a single brain cell saw as stoking racial hatred and instigating riots for clicks and views. They media these days are disgusting.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by pr0nbot ( 313417 )

        It's indy media that says, "yet another cop shot an innocent fucking black man in the head," not establishment.

        Yikes, now it's a crime to be fucking while black?

      • i see that as a standard of objectivity.

        maintain the passive voice as to not assign or imply guilt. Until the officer is convicted of murder there could be every possibility that there was a misfire.

        the fire arm discharged. it is not for the reporter to say whether the officer decided to shoot someone before the courts decide. to do otherwise would be incredibly irresponsible.

      • It's indy media that says, "yet another cop shot an innocent fucking black man in the head," not establishment.

        Is this the same media that kept showing a 12 year old was shot by George Zimmerman? I've noticed that any semblance of objective standards, accurate reporting, logic, and a single set of standards applied to all people involved are all out the door when the issue of "race" is involved.

  • Mirror (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Netzpolitik.org ist down right now because of capacity issues, but you can find the relevant info here - including how to donate: http://landesverrat.org/ [landesverrat.org].

  • Won't or can't? (Score:3)

    by wonkey_monkey ( 2592601 ) on Friday July 31, 2015 @02:25AM (#50220959) Homepage

    Germany Won't Prosecute NSA

    Could they even do so if they wanted to?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by koinu ( 472851 )
      Not in the USA, but they would try to identify everyone involved in this at the border and interrogate, or even arrest them probably (this also involves Obama). It is immediately clear why Germany does not want to do it. Especially the ruling party does not want to break ties with the USA.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GroeFaZ ( 850443 )
      The USA would most likely not allow any of their spies to be questioned, much less extradited for prosecution, because they don't give a damn about international law like that. Whoever from the BND cooperated with the NSA would be liable as well, and at least here, Range could use the full power of the law to go after them. He could determine foreign suspects from documents and order them brought in for questioning the moment they enter Germany. He could at least apply pressure.

      However, considering that f

    • Re:Won't or can't? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Friday July 31, 2015 @04:37AM (#50221431) Journal
      It depends how Germany now understands the NSA and all its help setting up West German telco systems after WW2.
      German decryption teams found gainful employment in 1945 with the UK/US TICOM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] teams.
      Generations of West Germans worked with the NSA and traveled to the US to view emerging US systems, hardware and other crypto systems.
      That kind of generational contact has allowed the US to handle elite German crypto staff and keep them away from any domestic West/German legal or political process.
      That deal with the USA gave West German total mystery over its internal and international communications networks for decades.
      So a few German elected political leaders are facing the might of decades of US/German military friendship at a top level beyond German law.
      Other US West German intelligence contacts can be understood from the Gehlen Organization years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      All German political parties know is their communications have been tasked by the USA even when declared safe by decades of expert West/German crypto officials.
      Any inter party or elected party efforts on this topic that where discussed over a secure German network of any kind would have been intercepted.
      Given the years of US/UK access to West/German political communications it would be hard to find a cleared German crypto expert who could even present the scope of what was done to German communications networks.
      The clearance levels that exist in Germany for German experts would not be of any use to any committee and no German staff with US systems access would be cleared by the US to talk to anyone in Germany at any level.
      The US and UK have that domestic legal staff aspect covered in an nation they 'help' :)
      US security work given to local German staff out rank any domestic German legal traditions or German fact finding political settings.

  • There is nothing new under the sun (Score:3, Insightful)

    by onallama ( 515297 ) on Friday July 31, 2015 @02:46AM (#50221033)

    If your goal is money, go after those with the deepest pockets. If your goal is intimidation, go after those with the least ability to defend themselves.

  • A bit of history (Score:5, Informative)

    by mseeger ( 40923 ) on Friday July 31, 2015 @03:06AM (#50221095)

    The last time such accusations were leveled against the press the secretary of defense had to vacate his chair afterwards. (Spiegel-Scandal [wikipedia.org])

    The time before, it won the person publishing "state secrets" the Nobel Peace Price (Carl con Ossietzky [wikipedia.org])

    So the accusations against netzpolitik.org are rather honoring them in the eyes of those who know history.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by umghhh ( 965931 )
      In defense of public prosecutors in Germany - they may have difficulties attacking the real culprits and going ahead with this charge may very well end up not where the government of Germany wants it to go.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        So your defense of them is essentially that the system of checks and balances does not work and sitting politicians of high enough rank an sufficiently important appointees are above the law?

        Just want to be clear.

        • Re:A bit of history (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Sique ( 173459 ) on Friday July 31, 2015 @09:32AM (#50222943) Homepage
          No, he's thinking more along Ulysses Grant; "I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution."

          If you never test bad laws or laws with unintended consequences in court, no one will ever see the bad outcomes and unintendend consequences.

          • If I had the points...
            Great post!

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by umghhh ( 965931 )
            Either way his best options were to charge the journalists. In this way a discussion is intensified and leads to the situation where one has to decide either way. In some states the journalists would end up in jail or some other GITMO like place or would be able to find out how difficult a life one has without being actually charged by justice system.
            Looks like Germans learned their lessons last century. Not all other nations were as fleissig .

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by GroeFaZ ( 850443 )
        They know exactly who the real culprits are, and they have zero interest in prosecuting them. The federal prosecutors ARE under direct control of the government. If the government wants to or does not want to prosecute someone, the prosecutors cannot go against that will.

  • They would never prosecute the NSA, they don't want to lose those agreements.

    The NSA spying on Merkel is a diplomatic faux pas, but it changes nothing. The German people get angry, German politicians say a few huffy words, and no one doers anything. Because Germany is playing the same game the NSA is in every capacity with the BND.

    You are a fool if you think it will ever be otherwise and you are bigger fool if you are German and you think it should be otherwise. The point of spying is to gather vital intell

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by umghhh ( 965931 )
      I think you forget about one little thing - the point of intelligence gathering may be exactly this. Everybody does it of course. It should be doing it rather with means accepted by the guys who pay or else face consequences. That is the basic thing about democracy. This activity may include cooperating with others in spying on enemies of the state within the country as long as that remains at least superficially legal or outside. It does not include however allowing gross spying on own people including gov

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jiriki ( 119865 )

      I agree they should not prosecute the bloggers, but exactly what the hell were these bloggers thinking? They were going to shut down or change the nature of spying? Make it respectful and transparent? What kind of quixotic cluelessness about reality is this?

      The bloggers published some budget plans of the "Verfassungsschutz" indicating that they were working on monitoring social networks. This should not be secret information at all and is not about spying but about controlling the spies. Or do you think the agencies should be allowed to operate without any supervision?

      Currently the Verfassungsschutz is sponsoring right wing terrorists ( https://translate.google.com/t... [google.com] ) instead of doing what they are supposed to do. So there is a severe lack of supervision

  • easy (Score:2)

    by umghhh ( 965931 )
    job to attack journalists. If it charge fails - freedom of press is the highest priority. If the charge succeeds then the country was saved against evil conspiracy.
    No such fortunate situation when real culprits from Verfassungschutz and other federal institutions including the chief master boss Frau Merkel would be charged with anything.
    The lists of triggers are still not analyzed by the parliamentary commission because NSA did not give its permission. Either German government is just a vassal of Murica o

  • Hange started an official investigation against the bloggers and their sources. They are now being probed for possible treason charges.

    You just broke my irony meter.

  • Despite plenty of evidence that the U.S. spied on German top government officials...

    Anonymous rumors posted on wikileaks are not evidence of anything.

  • Every country, since the dawn of ever, spies on every other country. It's expected and it prevents diplomatic misunderstandings, especially amongst allies.
  • Shooting the messenger is always such a great idea. [/sarcasm]
    • It's called a chilling-effect, and as the AC mentioned, if your goal is to prevent future messengers, it works pretty well.

Slashdot Top Deals

Heard that the next Space Shuttle is supposed to carry several Guernsey cows? It's gonna be the herd shot 'round the world.

Close