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[url]Report: US may have bugged Merkel's phone since 2002
October 26, 2013 2:27PM ET
Magazine also says Obama told the German chancellor he would have stopped spying on her if he had known about it
Topics: NSA Angela Merkel Barack Obama
Merkel
German Chancellor Angela Merkel's phone may have been tapped by the NSA for more than ten years, Der Spiegel reported.Yves Herman/AFP/Getty Images
The United States may have bugged Angela Merkel's phone for more than 10 years, according to a news report Saturday that also said President Barack Obama told the German leader he would have stopped it from happening if he had known about it.

Germany's outrage over reports about Merkel’s phone being tapped by the National Security Agency prompted German officials to summon the U.S. ambassador this week in an unprecedented postwar diplomatic rift.

German magazine Der Spiegel said Merkel's mobile telephone had been listed by the NSA's Special Collection Service (SCS) since 2002 – marked as "GE Chancellor Merkel" – and was still on the list weeks before Obama visited Berlin in June.

In an SCS document cited by the magazine, the agency said it had a "not legally registered spying branch" in the U.S. embassy in Berlin, the exposure of which would lead to "grave damage for the relations of the United States to another government."

From there, NSA and CIA staff were tapping communications in Berlin's government district with high-tech surveillance.

Quoting a secret document from 2010, Der Spiegel said such branches existed in about 80 locations around the world, including Paris, Madrid, Rome, Prague, Geneva and Frankfurt.

The magazine said it was not clear whether the SCS had recorded conversations or just connection data.

Obama apologizes

Obama apologized to Merkel when she called him Wednesday to seek clarification on the issue, Der Spiegel wrote, citing a source in Merkel's office.

Obama told Merkel he had not known of the bugging, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung said.

Merkel's spokesman and the White House declined comment.

"We're not going to comment on the details of our diplomatic discussions," said Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council at the White House.

Reuters[/url]

What I find interesting is the White House response and that of the National Security State's greatest defender, Diane Fienstein. It was only after international outrage that the Obama administration has done anything to address concerns. When the original NSA revelations came out, with angered Americans, it was certainly not the same response. If I was American, I would be livid that my politicians are only taking spying concerns seriously when the Germans are angry, not the American people.

Put Garton Ash and the NSA together, and you get a country (or rather a country's government machinery) actually doing a whole lot of listening, but in all the wrong ways.
Their America as new-age police state.
Moore's rolling out the cameras as I write.

I feel an instant and extreme horror at realizing the extent of the NSA's spying, which exceeds Orwell's 1984. What is worse, in 2013, is the de facto merging of governments and corporations. If the American government can know everything you do, so can a powerful corporation (and we've already seen appalling partnerships between Google, Facebook, etc. and the gov't). This argument may sound alarmist, but we must ask ourselves where these encroachments on our privacy are leading... nowhere good, I must say!

I'm willing to discuss the Big Brother angle more seriously if other posters sincerely believe it is the real issue here. However, I'm slowly coming around to the belief that the fear that government surveillance leads to tyranny is really just a kind of cover for a more deep-seated discomfort with the idea that some of our more private moments are, in fact, not quite so private. It is difficult to articulate why avoiding this discomfort should trump the government's security needs, so many people turn instead to the George Orwell argument, which is easier to articulate, but also much easier (in my opinion) to dismiss.

With this in mind, I agree with Stacey that it is interesting that so many of the people most upset at having their privacy 'invaded' by the government seem to value this privacy much less than any generation before them. Or, at the very least, they have a radically different conception of privacy, and of what is appropriate to share widely. Perhaps the idea of control or choice really is central to understanding what does seem to be, on the face of it, a somewhat paradoxical position.

All of this has me thinking more about what should be private, and about what has been considered so in the past. I wonder if it would be so bad if one of the (unintended) effects of government surveillance was that all electronic communication became considered less private, and more a part of the public domain. In such a world, the internet would be less anonymous, and even phone calls and e-mails to friends and family would be more formal. There would be no pretending that Skyping distant friends was a substitute for visiting them, or that e-mails and Facebook were a substitute for face-to-face conversation.

Of course the pessimist in me feels that if forced to choose between privacy and using our electronic toys as freely, we'd eventually return to our Twittering habits and just stop caring about who is listening in.

There are degrees of public awareness, and also degrees of surveillance. Right now, most people don't believe that the vast majority of their communications are being watched. And that is probably true. Furthermore, the small portion that is being listened to is simply being fed through computer algarhithms looking for key words and the like. Of that, only a very small percentage gets to human ears. So I think that we are far from a state where my hypothesis is being tested--granted, it was just a whimsical one at any rate.
As for the East German example, I think a distinction must be made between being watched by a government that is actively trying to control its populace and suppress any dissent, and one that is basically trying to hunt for terrorists and the like. The slippery slope argument that underlies the assertion that government surveillance inevitably leads to some kind of tyrannical police state suffers from the same fundamental flaw as most slippery slope arguments: pretty much everything in life is a slippery slope if looked at from a certain perspective. Sliding is not always inevitable, and many of life's essential challenges are all about finding and keeping one's footing on the inevitable 'slipper slopes' we find ourselves on.
I'd be interested if you could unpack your 'worry' a little more Danielle. What precisely are you concerned about or uncomfortable with? and why?
For my part, my concern is in some ways the opposite of most people's. I worry that if our legal framework puts too many limits--or at least the wrong kinds of limits (e.g., the excessively cumbersome FISA warrant process)--on government surveillance, we force the national security apparatus to break or bend the law. When forced to choose between bombs going off and following regulations, most will choose to prevent the former at the expense of the latter. And once the surveillance system is essentially forced off-the-books and underground, it becomes a lot harder to implement the right kinds of restrictions and procedures.

An interesting post, Todd H., thank you!
But if you will forgive me, I would like to return for a moment to something Wyatt Dick said:

"All of this has me thinking more about what should be private, and about what has been considered so in the past. I wonder if it would be so bad if one of the (unintended) effects of government surveillance was that all electronic communication became considered less private, and more a part of the public domain. In such a world, the internet would be less anonymous, and even phone calls and e-mails to friends and family would be more formal. There would be no pretending that Skyping distant friends was a substitute for visiting them, or that e-mails and Facebook were a substitute for face-to-face conversation."

I was surprised to read "formal". I was expecting more like "self-conscious" or "self-aware". And this, I thought to myself, could be a good thing! As you say, Todd H., in this world of the internet we seem to increasingly exist statistically, safe as anonymous digits in a huge algorithm no one will ever understand. And human weaknesses can breed and grow strong in this anonymity like a womb. There is a strange paradox here maybe. When our life is turned "inside out" (through all the social media, etc., like you say), everything outside starts to feel inside somehow. We are everywhere, yet nowhere. Everyone, yet no one. Everything, yet nothing. Visible to all, yet invisible. And shame, for instance, which can "open" the womb to the world, and give it air, and clean it from putridity, is lost.
But why would there be "no pretending (etc.)", Wyatt Dick? This I don't understand.

Ah yes, Wyatt, now I see: "As for 'no pretending', that was just another exploration of the same theme: if we couldn't share truly 'private' matters over Skype, e-mail, the phone, etc. then there would be an obvious advantage to seeing people in person. But as was pointed it out, it was all really just dreamy speculation. In the real world, people are too accustomed to their electronic communication patterns, and I doubt any amount of 'benign' surveillance would change them."
But not so dreamy maybe. If the inner is outer, and the outer knows the referent (that is, the you who is outered), then we have rediscovered shame again, and the village where shame (and other witness) hold things together. We are aware again, like a weir (I see these are like the same thing). We are closed and shut in, somewhere again.
The key then, is the referent. Does the "outerance" reference?

Thank you, Todd H. One of the strangest things of Japan's post-war history (I think) is the way that Ms. Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture, which first distinguished between Japanese (shame) and American (guilt) culture, written (during the war, by contract of the United States Office of War Information) with no knowledge of Japanese or first-hand knowledge of Japanese society, attacked from all sides since then, and implying Western "guilt" culture as superior or more advanced, is still adopted, almost as "gospel", not only by the West but by the Japanese themselves. (Some claim, partly to ignore or excuse themselves for the wartime behavior, since shame is (supposedly) not felt before those outside one's culture.)
(This article seems to me a fine brief summary of the view and its strange self-fulfilling history: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/31/ivy.php)
But let us imagine there is some truth to the distinction, and let us accept the following summary (from that article) for the sake of argument.
First Ms. Benedict:
"A society that inculcates absolute standards of morality and relies on men’s developing a conscience is a guilt culture by definition. … True shame cultures rely on external sanctions for good behavior, not, as true guilt cultures do, on an internalized conviction of sin. … [Shame] requires an audience or at least a man’s fantasy of an audience. Guilt does not."
And now the article author:
"shame appears as less developed, less autonomous, less evolved than guilt. Shame is felt always in relation to the Other, unlike guilt with its sturdy, consistent standards of morality (guilt is confessable). Shame is more primitive. Shame allows the most heinous deeds, and all is well, as long as these crimes are not exposed to the gaze of the world. Guilt does not depend on crime’s revelation. Guilt is internalized, autonomous; shame is externalized, heteronomous. Guilt is fixed; shame is mutable. Guilt is American; shame is Japanese.
"
Perhaps what is happening is something like this. The West, equipped with the tremendous Christian machinery, long after the animating spirit was lost, took its confidence in guilt, in guilt's intrinsic and intransitive capacity to hold things together, hold men to the straight line, into the anonymous flood world of the internet, trusting that somehow it would be protected from vice and triviality, selfishness and sin, even there, where the internal is external, because its superior moral machinery was so powerful.
But this confidence, which allowed that world to be born, was actually just hubris, and the nemesis is narcissism, moral weakness and disorientation, a vast fog of guilty guiltlessness. Like a big proud strong house drifting like a match box in a tsunami.
Without that confidence would this world have ever happened?
Without the clean "conscience" of Truman and Oppenheimer, would the bomb have ever been dropped?

Just thought I'd paste in this thread from our Americas Theater... I've been enjoying the global colloquy, and would love to hear more!

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Geoff-
Hamilton
Administrator
Posts: 75
Geoff Hamilton
"Mexican presidents fall victim of NSA spying"
on: November 2, 2013, 00:16 QUOTE REMOVE EDIT
from The Mazatlán Messenger

Mexican Presidents Fall Victim of U.S. Spying

"The latest leaks from whistleblower Edward Snowden detail how the National Security Agency spied on Mexican politicians. The NSA accessed text messages sent by current Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, as well as hacked former President Felipe Calderón’s e-mail.[...]"
http://mazmessenger.com/2013/10/27/mexican-presidents-fall-victim-of-nsa-spying/

Will this matter to Mexicans? What, if anything, might be the political fallout here?

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Jorge-
Sousa
New Member
Posts: 2
Jorge Sousa
Re: "Mexican presidents fall victim of NSA spying"
on: November 2, 2013, 00:29 QUOTE REMOVE EDIT
I don't know -- I expect that the Mexican political elite will complain, like other nations, and then... nothing. The Mexican people suspected as much and will not be outraged. More of the same, more of the same.

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sdiliberto
New Member
Posts: 12
sdiliberto
Re: "Mexican presidents fall victim of NSA spying"
on: November 6, 2013, 09:05 QUOTE REMOVE EDIT
I agree that there seems to be a lot of complaining and not much action, and it's not just Mexico, or the U.S., or any other country in particular. Apathy often seems to be a common and global epidemic. I often wonder if there will be some sort of tipping point where we'll think enough is enough. If so, what do you think that tipping point will be? If not, will we just keep going as if nothing matters?

--Stacey

Anna, (and Claire)
I'll bet you're making your post on a laptop, and I'll bet it has a camera built into it. If it doesn't, the next one will.
I'll bet that for every supposed 'secret' a relatively low level NSA contractor can download and sensationalize, there are ten more that are really secret, and I bet that one of them (still-secret #1) is that the NSA can watch you through your camera if they want to (certainly the garden variety hacker can do it, without the red light coming on). I'll bet that more people have cellphones in your town or neighbourhood than don't, and if they don't yet they will as soon as is humanly possible, and every one of those cellphones has cameras and geotracking built in (and, of course, two way microphones) and everyone of these features of them can be accessed surrpetitiously too (still-secret #2). Further, I bet a Google camera truck/bus/plane/bicycle has already taken a picture of your house/apartment (kids maybe following the little truck and laughing, it probably made the newspapers "we're on the map!") and that if you have a car everyone reading this forum can see it parked near where you live, and that the NSA has also paid/contracted/colluded with Google (still-secret #3) to take really really good pictures of a lot more than any public person will ever be able to see on Google maps. So far, all the government has had to do is figure a way to handle all the data we're providing while our attention is managed (by the same system) into coughing up even more, whatever else is left (outside the scope of these passive devices), onto social media sites to be data-mined for deeper 'texture'.

So, although I sincerely believe that you're not "one of those people", I'm curious to know if anything I've said in the previous 100 words or so is even the slightest bit accurate? I'm afraid that the only sign of not being part 'it' at all, this surveillance panorama, is by not being here (typing) at all, yet here we are.

Anna, you said: "I can only speak for myself, Todd and Wyatt, and for my family and friends, and we don't matter at all, I know, in our little town in Ukraine, but we feel better living in a world with privacy, with intimate, unmonitored communication when desired. Those values mean something to us, and give our lives dignity and humanity (or something like that, I'm not a philosopher). But you seem willing to dispense with them very easily, even find them amusing, as ignorant or unsophisticated."

I'm pretty sure that almost everyone shares precisely the same values, but I'm not sure how those values match up with the what seems like pretty simple acts: we've all, every single one of us reading this right now, brought into our homes, at our own expense, the very tools (including the 'soft' tools of education and habit) to ensure we are easily and soon irrevocably overseen--and understanding this, more or less, almost all of us will get on with smoothing out any wrinkles in the system (ease of use, cost, access). Here we are. Now, I don't think anybody's listening in at all or ever -- but we've nevertheless, made a consensual commitment to the logic that will, eventually, make it possible and even likely that we will be spied upon, and it's this commitment that's strange to me. I find it even stranger in the case of people who have lived with and suffered under governments who actively engaged in aggressive surveillance programs of their own populations in the past.

I leave a piece of cardboard covering the camera in the frame of my screen.
Having just written this last sentence, I realize how truly weird this world of ours has become.

T.

I think I probably have, more or less, at least on these issues, the same values as you do ("the old human ones I know and feel sure of"). I guess I'm saying is that I don't understand how this 'new' world is mine and not also yours? What I'm not so sure about is how you are displaying your resistance to the values 'in here'. You say that I seem to be accepting these new values and that you're not, but I'm telling you that I think your 2013 'telephone' is full of 'hidden' (perhaps in a fundamentally different way) microphones and cameras -- can we agree on that? If we can, then the best thing to do is to stop using the system all together--anything else is a kind of complicity that I would call consensual. If we can't agree that your computer is equipped to spy on you, or this comes as a surprise to you, then I guess I would ask you if it were true, what would you do then?

I don't think there is much (of what I would call) human life on the internet and what life there might be isn't sustained by anything like what you somewhat abstractly refer to as "sophisticated" values, but rather collection of common strings pulled out of the of old complex interweave of human behaviours and values, some as rudimentary as our infantile desire to push round buttons and be fascinated by shiny surfaces, some as simple as our desire for association, and now, of course, the basic need to earn a living.

I care. I think this is an important issue; but it is also a fiendishly complex and technical one. The devil really is in the details. This is all about trade offs, and any serious treatment of the issue is going to break down into an almost interminable series of judgment calls that will need to be informed by our values, a real appreciation of the threats we face, and a detailed understanding of the relevant technical issues. I'm personally humbled in the face of just how complex it all is. As an average citizen, I think the best we can do is try to figure out just what our priorities are and impart them in a coherent way to the decision makers.
This is why I think it is so important for us to figure out just what it is about surveillance that troubles us most. If you watch the video in the OP, you will hear a real smorgasbord of reasons to oppose NSA surveillance: It violates the Constitution! It infringes on the RIGHT to privacy! The government shouldn't have that much power! I believe it will be very difficult to decide which surveillance activities are acceptable, and which are not; which procedures and protections are adequate, and which are insufficient, if we can't sort through this cacophony of competing rationales for limiting government surveillance.
Personally, many of these objections to NSA surveillance ring a bit hollow to me. The idea that we are just a step away from Orwellian tyranny is not something I see much evidence for. Defending the Right to Privacy as some kind of abstract absolute is not something I'm interested in either. Even the comparisons to life in the Soviet Union, while useful in some respects, seem a bit off. There is a difference between being listened to by a government that is actively trying to repress your basic freedoms, and being listened to by a government that is on the whole trying to stop you from being blown up.
What rings truest to me are three words from Anna: intimacy, humanity, and dignity. She's right to say that at the heart of things, this is about what feels better. It is an aesthetic judgment, as most great moral judgments are. Imagine the important, life-defining phone calls of your life--a last call to a loved one on their deathbed when you just couldn't get back in time, or Skype sessions with a wife or husband who is working overseas to support the family, but whose absence is straining the marriage. Now imagine those calls being listened to, dissected, and transcribed by faceless, uninvolved 'analysts' thousands of miles away. It cheapens and dehumanizes it somehow; it feels horribly wrong. Even if this intrusion into our intimacy never impacts our lives directly, in a decent world, our most intimate moments shouldn't be someone else's morning memo.
That is how I feel anyways. And it really does make a difference why you are uncomfortable with government surveillance and data collection. A person who is principally concerned with limiting government power, for example, might be most upset by the 1.5 Billion dollar server farm that keeps track of everyone's phone bills, address, employment records, etc. But that doesn't really bother me so much. I'm most concerned about my private phone calls, and after that, my personal e-mails. If I have to prioritize, I'll prioritize them. 'Cause the thing is, it isn't a decent world. And we are going to have to make sacrifices. Franklin's line about not trading liberty for security was silly on the face of it 200 years ago, and it is even sillier now.
After considering our values comes considering the threat. And the threat is serious. It comes down to weighing the lives of potential victims of violence against the quality of life of everyone else. And while right now, the number of potential victims might not be so large, the future looks bleaker. It is very difficult to predict future technological trends, but most serious observers feel that it will continue to be increasingly difficult to control weapons that can unleash devastation on a large scale. If the day when we cannot effectively control access to nuclear weapons, for example, comes at a time when violent organizations have been left to flower relatively unchecked, we may all look back at past decisions with regret.

Frankly speaking I do not know if I can ever trust anything that carries the US name, nationality or origin (Even if against USA) That is true even about what is possibly related to USA. NSA has created enough mistrust and insecurity in all of us to feel being hunted as if by ghost in Halloween. I, therefore, prefer to read instead of writing. Let them do what they do and add to mistrust and increase their enemies.

How to deal with the meta-national issues is another of the complicating details. It is one thing to have procedures for how a government can conduct surveillance on its own people, but creating enforceable limits on how surveillance is conducted by one country on the citizens of another seems very tricky.

Hi. I've done some research on this topic and let me say, I was shocked.
But one thing I am able to comprehend and understand about the whole scheme are the foundations and false human beliefs. Not only America's history tends to show how people use every source possible to achieve their goal. This can be traced as far back as when former president T. Jefferson bought Louisiana from the French people in 1803, without considering the law. While having done so, it was merely stated that no matter how this happened, the main thing is that it worked.

Achieving goals without considering civil rights or the legislation, like in NSA’s case, already brought huge stains on humanity. This is an ethic question which goes far beyond the lies of the American government as in NSA’s case. What the world has come to is based on many strong and self-motivated decisions made by influential dictators supporting Machiavelli’s doctrine saying that ‘the end justifies the means’.
However, I do feel that we as a race are not ready for democracy; we most likely never will be ready for it. It seems to be in our genes to make bad and selfish decisions when we are given the opportunity, democracy in this case merely makes it easier for people to mess something up. Should this be a justifiable reason for illegal, or more accurately, if not bound by the law, immoral steps of any government? But let's face it, this is bound to happen, since human race will never be capable of selfless altruism overall, those few will always remain a minority.

It is quite interesting how far America usually goes when trying to justify its questionable decisions regarding its security measures and counter-terrorism actions, especially if we take into account that in recent wars, including the two World Wars, no battle was fought on American soil. Now, it is understandable that after 9/11 it would heighten its security, but what NSA is doing, spying on civilians, is the wrong approach to ensure safety. So there has to be more to it than that. Why would you want to spy on civilians apart from being able to control them? But does this control them really? How does this control them? Is it just to check whether everything is in order and simultaneously trying to catch suspects among the throng? America also isn`t the only country that spies on its citizens as well as on other countries (who do them same in turn, so will be excluded from this post). In the back of their minds I am sure Americans have been aware that with digitalization, their multimedia operations and personal information have become more vulnerable and exposed to whomever is clever enough to gain it (this includes the NSA). There is a strange juxtaposition on the Internet, where people feel free and shameless on the Internet (especially if they are anonymous), but at the same time their movements are monitored. I think the issue of spying is unlikely to be resolved, even if President Obama wants to negotiate, him and his cabinet most likely think gathering information in this manner is still useful and would still want to maintain it somehow.

I, for one, think the idea of a government agency monitoring communications is not all that bad, provided that the sole purpose of such activity is truly to detect and prevent criminal activity. Basically, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. We live in an age where data can easily be transmitted from one end of the planet to the other in a matter of seconds, which not only enables you and me to exchange lolcat pictures very easily but also allows criminals to engage in what they do best, which is sadly not quite as fun and harmless as lolcats.
On the other hand, if one wishes, for example, to send to someone else, purely for research purposes, of course, a file with delicate contents, such as, say, an erotic picture of themselves, quite possibly one does not very much wish for an NSA agent to view said delicate file. A silly example, perhaps, but a relevant one nonetheless.
I also find it rather amusing how people seem to be obsessed about their privacy and find the whole idea of communications monitoring outrageous, and yet the same people (not all, of course, but likely a considerable share) publicly share all manner of private information on social networks, even things that are normally extremely private, such as erotic pictures of themselves. And yet, when it comes to the government monitoring their online activity for reasons of security, they will not condone it.
In any case, if it were possible to ensure that the monitoring was only carried out to nip criminal activity in the bud, as it were, I would not have a problem with it at all. Certain sacrifices just have to be made for the common good. Especially if communications between members of the general public are only monitored in terms of certain keywords, which really is the only viable choice. If someone is flagged as suspicious based on these keywords (or other reasons, of course), it makes perfect sense for their communications to be monitored more closely. Sadly, there will likely always be someone who wants to spy on people for their own purposes and will misuse the technology, making this a rather problematic topic. Hopefully, in the future, we will be able to find a system that works for both those doing the monitoring and those being monitored.

I entirely agree with Yuuichi, and would add that the "broadest possible manner" must include revising our entire traditional understanding of concepts like privacy, freedom, rights, and information itself.
Think of the neural system in a human body, which the internet world is increasingly resembling, and ask yourselves, what rights do the neurons properly possess? what does privacy mean to them? how are they free, when so utterly and inextricably connected, one to the other and all to the cloud? and what does it mean to 'control information', when information itself becomes so fluid and cloudlike? (Consider the work--and the phenomenon--of Ai Weiwei, discussed in the Asia (Voices) forum.)
If we fail to rethink such notions, we will always be one step behind the technocrats who are defining them for us, imperceptibly (even to themselves).

Victory and vindication for all concerned in The Snowden Case: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/14/edward-snowden-pulitzer-statement-prize-guardian-washington-post.