Snowdon is a dummy

@Moment-in-Time,

Have a nice time, sounds fun. Been a long time since I've been to one.

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@Moment-in-Time,

Former Constitutional Court judge Hans-Joachim Jentsch told the Frankfurter Rundschau (newspaper) that he did not think the opposition’s move had much chance of success. "It is a case of balancing the lawmakers’ right to investigate against the duty [*] and right of the government to protect the country from potential harm - in this sense through acting against the interests of an ally," Jentsch said.

[*] The opposition argues that the government, in not actively seeking Snowden’s presence, is violating their right to gather evidence and investigate the spying of German citizens properly.

"We control the government and the intelligence services, and not vice versa," said Left party lawmaker Martina Renner, alluding to the appeal filed on Thursday evening.

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@Walter Hinteler,

Quote:

"We control the government and the intelligence services, and not vice versa," said Left party lawmaker Martina Renner, alluding to the appeal filed on Thursday evening.

That the way it is also supposed to work in the US, but in fact instead of theory it seems not to be the case.

We have a long and sad history of having periods where the government did not honor our constitution.

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@BillRM,

Quote:

That the way it is also supposed to work in the US, but in fact instead of theory it seems not to be the case.

We have a long and sad history of having periods where the government did not honor our constitution.

Other than constant whining, what is your solution? Have you joined any civil rights groups concerned with privacy and surveillance? Perhaps you could contribute to their cause?

Concerning Germany and Snowden coming there to participate in the investigation, from what I understood from Walter, and he can correct me if I am wrong, the issue has to be settled in their court.

If it turns out the court supports the government's side, I know ahead of time what the response will be. "The court fell under the pressure from fear of further damaging relations between Germany and the US."

If it turns out the court supports those bringing the suit, it will be interesting to see how it unfolds successfully.

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@revelette2,

revelette2 wrote:

Concerning Germany and Snowden coming there to participate in the investigation, from what I understood from Walter, and he can correct me if I am wrong, the issue has to be settled in their court.

If it turns out the court supports the government's side, I know ahead of time what the response will be. "The court fell under the pressure from fear of further damaging relations between Germany and the US."

If it turns out the court supports those bringing the suit, it will be interesting to see how it unfolds successfully.

The opposition parties think that the committee acted against the constition as well as the government. So their complain goes to the Federal Constitutional Court. But before any ruling will come (which will take months), the court has to accept the complaint - I'm not sure that they actually will.

The "fear of further damaging relations between Germany and the US" (aka national interest) must have a higher constitutional priority than the rights of the committee to get a ruling against the complaint.

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@Walter Hinteler,

At least people should give credit for those who seeking to bring Snowden in to actually do something about it, even know the odds are against them.

Well, as a totally unrelated note; I can't put off Monday morning cleaning after the weekend off any longer, soon everybody will be home and the whole thing starts again.

"Just another manic Monday..."

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@revelette2,

Quote:

Have you joined any civil rights groups concerned with privacy and surveillance?

LOL the EFF and the ACLU and I had donated funds to the new truecrypt project, the Tor project and some of the efforts to set up systems to offer more protection for email.

Oh this go back many moons [decades] as for example when the government was threatening to arrested PGP creator Phil Zimmermann for releasing strong cryptography worldwide I send in a check for a few hundreds dollars to his lawyer.

Of course I am always been willing to share my little knowledge of the art and science of cryptography and the available software in that field.

True compare to a real hero such as Snowden I had done very little.

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@revelette2,

The below was written in 1992 by Phil Zimmerman to go with one of his first released of PGP and it does stand the test of time.

An for giving the world the gift of some privacy the US government was threatening to have him arrested for exporting war materials without a license to do so.

An that was why I was writing checks at the time to his lawyer.

Quote:

Why Do You Need PGP?
====================

It's personal. It's private. And it's no one's business but yours.
You may be planning a political campaign, discussing your taxes, or
having an illicit affair. Or you may be doing something that you
feel shouldn't be illegal, but is. Whatever it is, you don't want
your private electronic mail (E-mail) or confidential documents read
by anyone else. There's nothing wrong with asserting your privacy.
Privacy is as apple-pie as the Constitution.

Perhaps you think your E-mail is legitimate enough that encryption is
unwarranted. If you really are a law-abiding citizen with nothing to
hide, then why don't you always send your paper mail on postcards?
Why not submit to drug testing on demand? Why require a warrant for
police searches of your house? Are you trying to hide something?
You must be a subversive or a drug dealer if you hide your mail
inside envelopes. Or maybe a paranoid nut. Do law-abiding citizens
have any need to encrypt their E-mail?

What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use
postcards for their mail? If some brave soul tried to assert his
privacy by using an envelope for his mail, it would draw suspicion.
Perhaps the authorities would open his mail to see what he's hiding.
Fortunately, we don't live in that kind of world, because everyone
protects most of their mail with envelopes. So no one draws suspicion
by asserting their privacy with an envelope. There's safety in
numbers. Analogously, it would be nice if everyone routinely used
encryption for all their E-mail, innocent or not, so that no one drew
suspicion by asserting their E-mail privacy with encryption. Think
of it as a form of solidarity.

Today, if the Government wants to violate the privacy of ordinary
citizens, it has to expend a certain amount of expense and labor to
intercept and steam open and read paper mail, and listen to and
possibly transcribe spoken telephone conversation. This kind of
labor-intensive monitoring is not practical on a large scale. This
is only done in important cases when it seems worthwhile.

More and more of our private communications are being routed through
electronic channels. Electronic mail is gradually replacing
conventional paper mail. E-mail messages are just too easy to
intercept and scan for interesting keywords. This can be done
easily, routinely, automatically, and undetectably on a grand scale.
International cablegrams are already scanned this way on a large
scale by the NSA.

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@BillRM,

Not that my opinion matters, but as you answered and shared, I say you are doing very well to contribute to your cause.

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Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency has for years passed data on German citizens to the NSA, according to what various print and tv/radio media reported yesterday.
All data on Germans was previously said to have been filtered out - this filter
a) didn't work properly (only up to 90% was filtered out ... sometimes,
b) even when the Germans stopped delivering data, the NSA tried to press to get more.

The BND was working for NSA exclusively when giving them those data,

The sources for this are official Bundestag (parliament) and secret Government documents.

[In English, there's only a bad translated report at RT and a short report yesterday on DW. Might be tomorrow or on Monday more will be out in English.]

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@Walter Hinteler,

What sort of info? Who was a commie?

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@Olivier5,

In this "Operation Eikonal", the NSA, because they couldn't do it Germany, got collected communication data from the De-Cix internet exchange node in Frankfurt ... by the BND. Though the BND used a filter, trying not give protected German data to the USA, this filter didn't work properly. All that happened between 2004 and 2008 (that's the period in those mentioned documents).

For google-translate users: here's yesterday's original report

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@Walter Hinteler,

Countries spy on one another...and often allies spy on allies.

Also, various intelligence agencies work in concert...often for decent, reasonable reasons.

Nothing new here.

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@Frank Apisa,

That's not my/the point. The spying was done by our foreign spy agency. And they gave protected (by law and the constitution) data to a foreign agency.

The "G-10 law", a German federal law that regulates the surveillance powers of Germany's intelligence agencies, is similar to Britain's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 and is comparable to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of the United States.
However, no-one controlled them. (And according to the above mentioned reports, even hiher ranked officials in the agencies didn't want to do it but felt pressed by the Americans.)

Quote:

Article 10
[Privacy of correspondence, posts and telecommunications]

(1) The privacy of correspondence, posts and telecommunications shall be inviolable.

(2) Restrictions may be ordered only pursuant to a law. If the restriction serves to protect the free democratic basic order or the existence or security of the Federation or of a State, the law may provide that the person affected shall not be informed of the restriction and that recourse to the courts shall be replaced by a review of the case by agencies and auxiliary agencies appointed by the legislature.

1 Reply

@Walter Hinteler,

Walter Hinteler wrote:

That's not my/the point. The spying was done by our foreign spy agency. And they gave protected (by law and the constitution) data to a foreign agency.

The "G-10 law", a German federal law that regulates the surveillance powers of Germany's intelligence agencies, is similar to Britain's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 and is comparable to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of the United States.
However, no-one controlled them. (And according to the above mentioned reports, even hiher ranked officials in the agencies didn't want to do it but felt pressed by the Americans.)
Quote:
Article 10
[Privacy of correspondence, posts and telecommunications]

(1) The privacy of correspondence, posts and telecommunications shall be inviolable.

(2) Restrictions may be ordered only pursuant to a law. If the restriction serves to protect the free democratic basic order or the existence or security of the Federation or of a State, the law may provide that the person affected shall not be informed of the restriction and that recourse to the courts shall be replaced by a review of the case by agencies and auxiliary agencies appointed by the legislature.

Okay, Walter...but I was making MY POINT.

Countries do indeed spy on one another...and often allies spy on allies.

Also, various intelligence agencies work in concert...often for decent, reasonable reasons.

Perhaps I should have added: And the intelligence agencies of stronger countries tend to put pressure on the intelligence agencies of weaker countries...often resulting in the weak intelligence agencies giving help to the strong intelligence agencies.

I'm not sure of what your point is, Walter, but if it is that German intelligence agencies are not especially strong...and will allow the US to bully them...imagine what will happen when Putin decides to bully them.

1 Reply

@Frank Apisa,

Frank Apisa wrote:

I'm not sure of what your point is, Walter, but if it is that German intelligence agencies are not especially strong...and will allow the US to bully them...imagine what will happen when Putin decides to bully them.

Well, I don't know what Putin's secret services have to offer. But what the Americans did must have been good enough to for ours to break the constitution, not to inform those who should have been informed, lie to the control panels and inquiry committees ...

1 Reply

@Frank Apisa,

Frank Apisa wrote:

Also, various intelligence agencies work in concert...often for decent, reasonable reasons.

The "decent, reasonable reasons included or were mostly unconstitutional

Frank Apisa wrote:

Nothing new here.

I've noticed such.

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@Walter Hinteler,

Walter Hinteler wrote:

Frank Apisa wrote:
I'm not sure of what your point is, Walter, but if it is that German intelligence agencies are not especially strong...and will allow the US to bully them...imagine what will happen when Putin decides to bully them.

Well, I don't know what Putin's secret services have to offer. But what the Americans did must have been good enough to for ours to break the constitution, not to inform those who should have been informed, lie to the control panels and inquiry committees ...

The Constitution...yours and ours...were not meant to be suicide pacts, Walter.

There are things going on that need action that these nice, neat Constitutions are not going to allow for.

That is one of the reasons why people often mention that democracies are not nearly as efficient as non-democracies.

Things need to be done...people are going to do them. If it leads to dictatorship...the country was not strong enough to begin with.

1 Reply

@Frank Apisa,

Frank Apisa wrote:

The Constitution...yours and ours...were not meant to be suicide pacts, Walter.

No. But we have some parts in our constitution which can't be amended or changed ("Eternity clause").
Besides by a revolution and creating a new country. (Okay, not really a revolution: "Art 146: This Basic Law, which since the achievement of the unity and freedom of Germany applies to the entire German people, shall cease to apply on the day on which a constitution freely adopted by the German people takes effect.")

1 Reply

@Walter Hinteler,

Walter Hinteler wrote:

Frank Apisa wrote:
The Constitution...yours and ours...were not meant to be suicide pacts, Walter.

No. But we have some parts in our constitution which can't be amended or changed ("Eternity clause").
Besides by a revolution and creating a new country. (Okay, not really a revolution: "Art 146: This Basic Law, which since the achievement of the unity and freedom of Germany applies to the entire German people, shall cease to apply on the day on which a constitution freely adopted by the German people takes effect.")

Is one of those parts that cannot be amended or changed...the part that the German intelligence community violated?

So much for what can and cannot be done, Walter.

1 Reply

Snowdon is a dummy

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