"That is not a billy goat, but our Minister of Horticulture"

A COMMENTARY ON THE TRAGEDY OF THE NSA INVESTIGATION COMMITTEE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

It is now 3 years since Edward Snowden risked his own security and informed the world about the permanent mass surveillance of the Internet by the NSA and the so-called "five-eyes" (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK and USA). Germany was the only country on the entire earth which saw this as reason for establishing an investigation committee. The task was, amongst other things, to determine "to what extent the Federal Government or intelligence services were aware of such practices, were involved in them, opposed them or benefited
from them". The BND had a problem with this, because as became clear in the first public session of the committee, according to the opinion of the three expert witnesses called, "the entire German foreign intelligence service is unlawful". That was on 22 May 2014. On 16 February 2017, Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel was heard as the last witness of the committee and thus ended the 66th public and therefore also concluding session. A very special witness – the witness who actually set everything in motion – was desired as witness number 1 by all 8 committee members on 8 May 2014, but was not heard. This is Edward Snowden himself. He currently still lives in Russia with temporary asylum, under conditions that at best allow him to express very diplomatically worded
criticism of the Russian system. But if all committee members
agreed that Snowden was the most important witness, why
was he not heard? The problem arose over how he could be
questioned. If Snowden were to be brought by aeroplane to Berlin,
questioned in the Bundestag and then sent back to Russia,
that presents a problem in the eyes of the Federal Government. For Snowden, the
possibility of filing an asylum application would open up, which has so far been
denied to him on the grounds of the German embassy in his Russian exile in Moscow. Furthermore,
the USA is preparing charges against the "traitor" Snowden and possibly
German authorities would then have to extradite him. That is why the German Justice Ministry was tasked with analysing the legal situation and was unfortunately unable, by the conclusion of the committee's evidence-taking,
to make a ruling on whether he could be invited. The mills of the Justice Ministry do grind exceedingly slowly. The Grand Coalition therefore proposed that a video conference with Snowden could simply be set up
in order to question him in this way. The Opposition spoke out against it, because under his asylum conditions Snowden could not, as stated, speak freely.
The unspoken truth, however, is that 6 of the 8 members of the committee
are part of the government faction and the Federal Government simply
has no interest in offending its American allies by inviting a "traitor" to visit. Whether the committee can thereby achieve the goal for which it was established is secondary. On the contrary, Head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution Maaßen moreover had the audacity to put forward the thesis that Snowden might possibly be a Russian agent. In doing so, he ignores the obvious opportunity for Russian President Putin to present himself through the admission of Edward Snowden as a defender of freedom rights, to discredit the USA as an unlawful state and to demonstrate the renewed inability of the EU to act. The committee also faced other obstacles, because information was only granted about already concluded operations of the BND and only those that took place in cooperation with the five-eyes. Nevertheless, the committee was able to uncover some interesting details of the BND's illegal work, including some quite interesting interpretations of applicable law. For example, the BND claimed the right to intercept all communication via satellites, because according to the so-called "space theory" satellites are not on German soil but in space. The Basic Law does not apply there and therefore communication that travels via space is no longer protected by the Basic Law. Note that according to the BND, it is not the citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany who enjoy the protection of the Basic Law, which is why their communication is protected from state interference, but rather the communication of citizens enjoys this right, and only within the scope of application of the Basic Law. Although this assumption must also be restricted, because the BND has come up with yet another theory, namely that of "virtual foreign territory". This means that the Internet hub De-CIX in Frankfurt am Main, whose cables are laid on German soil, does not have to be recognised as within the scope of application of German Basic Law, since this is the Internet. The Internet is thus not only uncharted territory, but also "virtual foreign territory" and may therefore, according to BND logic, be monitored at will. If I wanted to, I could write pages about the multiple breaches of law by the BND (if you are interested, then take a look at the report by the Federal Data Protection Officer Andrea Voßhoff (CDU) leaked by netzpolitik.org, according to which the BND is said to have committed 18 serious violations of law). But I do not wish to do so at this point. I am aware that the main reason why the population tolerates all-encompassing mass surveillance at most with slight misgivings is fear of terrorism. Since 9/11, terrorism has become one of the greatest fears of the Western world and the perpetrators have come ever closer to us. Since the attacks in Paris at the latest, terrorism is no longer an Arab problem but we could all become victims. Faced with this horrific scenario, which hardly leaves anyone unmoved, the need for a sense of security becomes ever more dominant. This is the reason why governments grant intelligence services, which promise to protect us from terrorism, ever more powers. However, the NSA investigation committee has uncovered much that is incompatible with this promise. Why, for example, does the BND monitor high-ranking politicians from the EU, NATO and the UN? What danger does the children's charity UNICEF pose? What attack could the International Criminal Court in The Hague be planning? Are the Red Cross, Oxfam and the World Food Programme in cahoots with IS? Are companies like Lockheed, EADS and Eurocopter pursuing secret world domination plans that the BND is tracking? Are journalists as dangerous as terrorists or why were employees of the BBC, New York Times and Reuters monitored? Will IS soon attack us with exploding birds or why does the BND consider it necessary to monitor Angry Birds? Of course not. It is crystal clear what this is about. It is about power. The more the BND can find out about high-ranking decision-makers, the more confidently the German government can act at international conferences. This knowledge can in special cases also be used to publicly denounce individuals. Because everyone has something to hide. Because firstly, privacy is characterised by the fact that one has the right to decide for oneself what one makes public and what one does not, and secondly, values and norms are not immutable but constantly in flux. For example, for our grandparents wearing fur coats was still a status symbol, but fur has been largely shunned on animal welfare grounds. This brings me to my next, more general point. In the USA, Donald Trump has already been elected President, in France Marine Le Pen is given realistic chances of winning the election and although it currently looks in Germany as if the AfD is far from the chancellery, we cannot sit idle. It may be that we have trusted our previous heads of government so much that we would grant them rights that go beyond the constitution. However, the Basic Law was established as a protection of citizens against the state on the basis of experience of the Nazi regime and was constructed so that our country could survive a legislative period of anti-democratic governments. But what is being established through fear of terrorism is an infrastructure that could be excellently exploited by those very governments that could be elected into office at any time. In February 2012, the US Congress authorised the President to fly drones over American soil. It was pointed out that Congress trusted the person Barack Obama and therefore had no concerns. But now Donald "take out their families" Trump has been elected President. A man who in one week ordered as many drone strikes in Yemen as Barack Obama did in a year (the basis for selecting targets is metadata, by the way). A Federal Chancellor Frauke "shoot-to-kill orders at the borders" Petry could easily misuse this surveillance infrastructure for her purposes. Moreover, Western nations are making another fatal mistake in this way. States like Russia and China are building ever more totalitarian surveillance machines and can point to us in doing so. In this way, moral decay processes begin, because with a view to Guantanamo, Putin can relativise his own human rights violations, a finger pointed at the NSA is enough for China to defend spying on unwelcome opposition figures and Erdoğan can point to the BND's eavesdropping on journalists and say he is merely taking a step further. The cause of this problem is a deception, a false promise. Intelligence services claim that more surveillance provides more security, although they are actually pursuing their own interests. What is convenient about this deception is that every attack committed provides grist for the mill of the intelligence services, because according to the surveillance narrative, more far-reaching powers could prevent the attack. However, this is not verifiable and is therefore not an argument but a non-argument.
Fear of unemployment has always taken precedence over minimum wage, environmental protection and wage increases in the past, now fear of terrorism has taken precedence over civil rights. But instead of seeking solutions to bring people together, politicians resort to nationalist egotistical measures by giving their own intelligence services the means for total surveillance to eavesdrop on all people at all times, instead of pulling together by only monitoring those who are genuinely suspected in a targeted manner. But that is not how politics works unfortunately. In view of the breaches of law by the BND that the investigation committee exposed, the Federal Government came up with the brilliant idea of simply legalising these illegal practices, giving the BND an even much larger scope and moreover granting them an additional 300 million euros per year. I think I'll check whether I might not be able to find a place at Mars One after all.