Germany Won't Prosecute NSA, But Bloggers 111
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.
Ever heard of the Stasi prosecuting KGB? (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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)
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.
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"The difference is: the shredded STASI documents were reconstructed"
a few things were reconstructed. Most digital files were were shredded by entire truckloads of harddisks.
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By 1989, Soviets and their client states definitely had desktop PCs and associated devices, including hard drives. Mostly copies of Western tech of a few years before then, so we're talking about 5Mb hard drives here, but still. In fact, GDR was the one Warsaw Pact country where most of that stuff was made for use by the others - look up "VEB Robotron". And of all places to actually get them, I would imagine that Stasi would be the first on the list.
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I'm not the OP, and I wasn't saying that Stasi literally had "truckloads of harddisks". Just that you're probably just as wrong in assuming that they had none or so little that it's not worth mentioning, as he is in assuming that they had most of their data on them.
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What concerns them more, I think, is how mere bloggers - ostensibly average people who wouldn't normally have that kind of professional spying capability- found out about their plans. If common bloggers can dig up secret government
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"The Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz is probably looking to learn from, or cooperate with the NSA to increase it's own capabilities"
Nah, The BfV is spying german industries for US. Germany is shooting itself in the foot here...
So much stupid (Score:1)
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)
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)
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]
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well, whites should start whining then against lose of their lives too, not just for iphones.
They don't because white people realize that if you pull a gun on a cop, or try to fight a cop or run a cop over with a car your ass is likely to get shot, and deservedly so.
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They don't because white people realize that if you pull a gun on a cop, or try to fight a cop or run a cop over with a car your ass is likely to get shot, and deservedly so.
Or refuse a 'request' that would be unlawful if it were an order, and face harassment and arrest at the least. Or use a camera (witnessed NOLA officers beat a photographer prior to going after hippies in a dimly lit area - they've adapted to cell phone cameras!); or drive with out of state plates, etc...
Re: So much stupid (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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).
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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)
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.
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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
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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.
Re: So much stupid (Score:2)
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
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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.
Re: So much stupid (Score:2)
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
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> 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
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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.
Re: So much stupid (Score:2)
Want to guess what the most common motivation for home robberies here is ? To steal guns.
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Can you clarify "here"?
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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
Re: So much stupid (Score:2)
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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Derail discussion on state secret police apparatus with more thinly veiled identity politics. Stay classy shills.
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Hey everyone! We finally found Donald Trump's Slashdot account!
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"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.
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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?
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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.
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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)
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)
Germany Won't Prosecute NSA
Could they even do so if they wanted to?
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However, considering that f
Re:Won't or can't? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Slashdotted even before it comes to slashdot. Lets hope it raises this site's value, I'm sure DHI would get quite a nice price on the black market. You know, sourceforge for the malware distribution (They even did tests already in that direction!), slashdot for the DDOS.
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Alternate link : http://landesverrat.org/ [landesverrat.org]
There is nothing new under the sun (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re: Treason - Peace on (Score:4, Insightful)
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The fun thing about this, is that the German Verfassungsschutz might well be the one that really is commiting treason, by ignoring the Verfassung (the Constitution) it is sworn to protect, and by spying illegally on German citizens. However, given the definition of treason in the German Verfassung, which might require foreign involvement, maybe not.
But then, the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND, same as the CIA in the USA), DID spy on German people and DID deliver the information to the NSA. Which quite
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So any material could could walk out from the West/German bureaucracy or military has some powerful sanctions with none of the US wisdom with "... free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people "
Upset West/German democracy and the gov has a huge bureaucracy set up just to correct that.
A bit of history (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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)
If you never test bad laws or laws with unintended consequences in court, no one will ever see the bad outcomes and unintendend consequences.
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Great post!
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Looks like Germans learned their lessons last century. Not all other nations were as fleissig .
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Germany has reciprocal spying agreements (Score:2, Flamebait)
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
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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
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you believe espionage will go away someday? how or why?
the desire to know information someone else is hiding will pretty much always exist as long as human nature exists
easy (Score:2)
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
Not charging NSA or GCHQ but (Score:2)
You just broke my irony meter.
Plenty of reason? (Score:2)
Despite plenty of evidence that the U.S. spied on German top government officials...
Anonymous rumors posted on wikileaks are not evidence of anything.
Because everyone spies (Score:2)
Shooting the messenger (Score:1)
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Old news: Investigation was already halted yesterd (Score:1)
http://www.thelocal.de/2015073... [thelocal.de]
Fact checking? Nah. Hype sells!
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http://uk.businessinsider.com/... [businessinsider.com]
Public prosecutor got fired over it.
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Re: Germany is rising to power again (Score:1)
It has already happened. It ended. They won, we lost and there won't be any rematch. Ever. Are you happy now?