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German Federal Intelligence Service BND Violates Laws And Constitution
- jdimov10 10y agoOh, and other countries' intelligence services would never think of violating any laws, heaven forbid... You know how your government keeps convincing you of the supremacy of the "rule of law" and how "nobody is above the law", etc., etc... I think it's beyond obvious to anyone with half a brain that these are boogie-monster fairy tales. When most people speak of law, what they mean is "rules that everyone must follow". When the lawmakers speak of law, they mean "rules we've been told to make everyone follow". Of course, the people and entities that these laws come from are above the law almost by definition. The amount of hypocrisy surrounding "justice" systems around the world is tremendous - it has always been. But people mostly like it this way - it's worked for a few thousands of years and is likely to work for a few thousand more.
- PavlovsCat 10y agoEverything "works". Even our sun going supernova "works". The question is, towards what end.
- ceejayoz 10y ago> Even our sun going supernova "works". Our sun can't go supernova.
- nier 10y agoHad to look this up as it isn’t my core competency. According to current knowledge our sun is too small for a supernova explosion. It might become a red giant (5 to 6 billion years) and then a white dwarf.
- happy_tentacles 10y agoSad faith - get super bloated, kill all the live in vicinity, then shrink to a shadow of former self for the remainder of the life time of the universe. NO, supernova would be so much more spectacular. At least it might give a standard candle for others observing this galaxy, become a measuring stick for the universe, and spill some heavier elements for whatever comes next. -- Should privacy laws end where atmosphere of our planet ends? If the Outer Space take of Bundesnachrichtendienst is true, we would be for an overhaul of quite few laws once more humans get beyond law earth orbit.
- Pica_soO 10y agoWe need too make a obelisk, engraved upon which stands: "Stealing other systems gas-giants and feeding them to your own sun is okay. I spilled some resources at the start." God
- PavlovsCat 10y agoSame different: the inability of our sun to go supernova "works", as does the wilful miscomprehension of my point - the question again is, towards what end.
- reacweb 10y agoI disagree. These are not fairy tales. These are what we shall tend for, even if we live in an imperfect world. Stating that the constitution is bogus does not imply that we shall throw it out, but that we shall fix it. the NSA should not violate the law to make its job. Maybe the law shall be fixed, maybe behavior of the NSA shall change, probably both.
- x2398dh1 10y agoYou're taking the concept of, "knowledge," and the concept of, "government" and mixing them together into a very swirly, confused, nihilistic statement. Are laws written down on paper simply that they will be broken by the government, but not by the people? While that may almost inevitably happen over the decades and centuries of a republic existence, that is certainly not the intent of laws, at least in a western republic such as Germany or the US. Governments breaking laws is not, "above the law," - it is actually, by definition, breaking the law, when the Government breaks the law, which is the opposite of what you're saying. You're saying that everyone knew when those laws were written, that they would actually be breakable by the government. That's not true. The lawyers who bring and win cases against the Government don't know that...in fact, they know the opposite to be true. Now, as to the question of the conduct of individual politicians who believe they can break the law, that is a third question - is it OK for politicians to break the law to achieve a certain end? Well...sometimes yes, sometimes no...you can't just make a blanket statement saying that 100% of the time every time a politician has broken a law that it has been morally corrupt. There is a such thing as bad laws. Overall, I think your heart is in the right place in terms of wanting better moral conduct, but you are very confused on what Governments are, and you should perhaps consider delving further into historical literature on the subject.
- sneak 10y agohttp://www.hasjamesclapperbeenindictedyet.com http://www.hasjamesclapperbeenindictedyet.com There are two sets of laws. One for lawmakers, the ultra-wealthy, politicians, judges, military, and cops (the protected class who can carry weapons); and another one for you and I.
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- lern_too_spel 10y agoAlmost nobody has been indicted from a Senate hearing, whether they were high level bureaucrats like Clapper or ordinary private citizens, and there have been lies and half-truths in almost all of them. In this case, Clapper admitted his mistake answering this question which he likened to many similar questions about whether the NSA was intercepting Americans' communications and creating dossiers on them, which it was not.
- mpweiher 10y agoIn other breaking news: water wet.
- harrynotlarry 10y agoFire indeed hot!
- germanier 10y agoOne of the more "fun" things they use to justify what they do internally: the outer space theory. You have to know that the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) is (simplified) only allowed to operate outside Germany. Now they have antennas in Germany to monitor communication passively relayed on a satellite. As we all know, the satellite is located outside Germany, so they pretend this is legal. In a similiar argument, internet exchange points in Frankfurt are declared "effectively outside Germany" and therefore fair game. If you find that interesting, at last year's 32C3 they had a fun renenactment of some abstruse scenes full of such things[0] from the parliamentary investigation committee on the NSA and its cooperation with the BND (which itself is not filmed publicly). English interpretation is available. https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7225-grundrechte_gelten_nicht_im_weltall#download https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7225-grundrechte_gelten_nicht_im... To anyone German-speaking[1] in Berlin I can recommend visiting a session of the committee. It's really illuminating to see those intelligence agents trying to save their face firsthand. https://www.bundestag.de/bundestag/ausschuesse18/ua/1untersuchungsausschuss/tagesordnungen https://www.bundestag.de/bundestag/ausschuesse18/ua/1untersu... [0]: Did you know that US intelligence interrogated refugees in Germany on "the bread supply situation" in their home countries and used Google Maps for that? [1]: Sometimes they have English-speaking witnesses. This week it's people from the ACLU but they also had an US drone pilot and a Verizon executive in the past.
- mtgx 10y agoYes, all spy agencies tend to use "technically legal" stuff like that to operate around what the law intended to stop them from doing. This is why it's so critical to have an oversight committee with deep knowledge of everything that's going on within the agency, regular audits, and a willingness to actually act as supervisors in favor of the law - NOT the agency. That should be their job. Unfortunately, virtually all such committees tend to act more as cheerleaders for the spy agencies than actual supervisors meant to hold the agencies accountable.
- dmix 10y agoAnd in the unlikely scenario where Germany or one of the five eyes do get proper controls then they can always just lean on the US, who most definitely wont be getting controls anytime soon as both presidential candidates want more intel gathering (greatly expanding collection is Hillary's primary security strategy). They can just stop storing the data locally and call up the NSA whenever they need anything they can't collect legally themselves.
- fiatjaf 10y agoSo who was expecting that the State would be honest?
- pyvpx 10y agoconsidering in a democratic system the government is a representation of the will of the governed and, you know, us governed types don't expect us to lie to ourselves. or something.
- fiatjaf 10y agoYour deduction is right but your assumptions are wrong.
- clarkmoody 10y ago> government is a representation of the will of the governed No. By this reasoning "we are all murderers." A democratic system means that 51% of the people can legally deprive the other 49% of basic liberties.
- wongarsu 10y ago>A democratic system means that 51% of the people can legally deprive the other 49% of basic liberties. That's an implementation quirk of some democracies, not an inherent feature. Even worse: in first-past-the-post systems like the US and GB you can elect 51% of the representatives with far less than 51% of the people. On the other hand, "basic liberties" are usually protected by some for of constitution that requires 66% of representatives to change. Sometimes protections are even more extreme: Germany is considered democratic, but its constitution contains two articles that can not be lawfully changed, no matter how large the consens (one about basic rights, one about the form of government). Democracies can have arbitrarily strong protections for minorities and basic liberties, there is no requirement for democracies to be governed by simple absolute majorities (and few if any are).
- ptaipale 10y agoWhat you describe is "dictatorship of the majority"; at least over here, when people talk about democracy, they mean "liberal democracy", i.e. as Wikipedia puts it, a variant of representative democracy that may include elements such as political pluralism; equality before the law; the right to petition elected officials for redress of grievances; due process; civil liberties; human rights; and elements of civil society outside the government.
- krylon 10y ago> The BND’s claim that this information is essential, cannot substitute a missing legal basis Let this roll around on your tongue for a moment. This is kind of like robbing a bank and then saying you really needed the money.
- Artoemius 10y ago> This is kind of like robbing a bank and then saying you really needed the money. That's a radical idea, but it has started to gain some popularity: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/stealing-food-not-a-crime-italy_us_57296b6fe4b016f378941ef9 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/stealing-food-not-a-crim...
- maze-le 10y agoDo you seriously copmare the robbery of a bank with a homeless person stealing food?
- Artoemius 10y agoNot seriously. But I wouldn't seriously argue that it is always rational to follow the law, either. Sometimes you really need the money.
- themartorana 10y agoActually, not if you're a government. The last time they didn't follow the letter of the law, we started torturing people again because we were really hungry. Most of our laws that exist at extremes (no torture, Geneva Convention) exist as a reaction against what did happen the last time a stressful situation was lawless, and a rational check against the next time stress brings up a possible irrational reaction. Stealing food should always be a crime - it let's us then consider the circumstances surrounding the action, and forgive the crime. (This is the basic argument against mandatory sentencing. It removes empathy, which makes us less than human.)
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- schlowmo 10y agoIf you look at the media coverage of this topic in Germany so far one could come to the conclusion that those mass-surveillance operations which reach the public are considered more harmful when they are carried out by foreign agencies (Surprise!...I know). This report hit the major news front pages for only one day - my guess is that it has been longer if it was the NSA (or at least the GCHQ) instead of the BND.
- kuschku 10y agoWell, at least the BVerfG, which does care about privacy, has jurisdiction about the BND. It’s been quite obvious in the past years that the only part of the state the people trust is the court system.
- themartorana 10y agoIt surprises me just how quickly the major world governments all started violating sovereign laws and spying on/surveilling their own citizens. Effectively, everyone is now monitored all the time by their own governments bereft of suspicion of having committed a crime - or under the blanket suspicion of everyone being capable of committing a crime (AKA "act of terrorism"). Conspiracy theorists might see the War on Terrorism as a premeditated concoction to justify massive state surveillance, since it's about everyone's justification. That's silly though. We all know they just took advantage of an existing situation, right?
- nxzero 10y ago>> "Conspiracy theorists might see the War on Terrorism as a premeditated concoction to justify massive state surveillance" Conspiracies aside, the term for this is a false flag operation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag Given intelligence agencies like the CIA even do this internally to others within the agency, anything is possible: https://www.google.com/search?q=cia+eyewash https://www.google.com/search?q=cia+eyewash
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- vidarh 10y agoWhat do you mean "how quickly"? Mass surveillance has been going on for decades. The only new thing is the amount of data the average person has travelling over networks that can be monitored, and the ease of increasing the volume captures. My favourite example is that in the early 90's, while I was politically active for a period, I met a number of interesting characters, including the ex-editor of a tiny Norwegian communist newspaper. He told me about how he for many years had intelligence agents come up to him on the street to crack jokes about conversations he had with his wife in his own home. While that was outright bugging of his flat, it was part of a many decades long illegal surveillance operation covering pretty much everyone on the political left in Norway (well, to the left of the social democrats who started it) regardless of whether or not they were involved in anything at all. It was finally rolled up in mid 90's, after the police and parliament had spent several decades ignoring reports from victims of it and insisting that kind of thing didn't happen.
- cm3 10y agoI've lost general respect for German intelligence and policing apparati after Thuringen willfully destroyed evidence regarding right-wing-terrorists to cover their misdeeds. Happened again later in a murder case in Kassel in the same investigation. It may be isolated incidents, but that this is possible and the fact that there have been no visible consequences to make up for it is telling. If there are long-term interests/plans and these are games like those played by the CIA, then at least let the public know about this little detail and argue for keeping it confidential and excuse collateral damage. I won't condone it, but it would be an explanation, if it's not brought forward on every 2nd incident. That said, I do have respect for the foot soldiers in the force, just as I do for hospital staff.
- schlowmo 10y ago> "It may be isolated incidents" Yes, "it may". German agencies are famous for "isolated incidents". It's only a matter of definition what's to be called "isolated". Those isolated incidents reach back even to the "Operation Gehlen"[0], the predecessor of the BND which was founded in 1946. One could say that the history of German agencies is the history of isolated incidents. While this may hold true for intelligence agencies all over the world, the historic ties leave a very bad taste regarding right-wing-terror in Germany. The "National Socialist Underground" (NSU)[1] was only the tip of the iceberg. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gehlen_Organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gehlen_Organization [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Underground https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Underground
- cm3 10y agoRegarding NSU, to this day I've failed to figure out how they dubbed their pink panther video with what sounds like the original German dub voice and made it sound good. Searching on the internet is hard because it finds all kinds of irrelevant stuff. Would like to know more and if this is easily possible for extremists with laptops to accomplish in such seamless quality, if it's a stitch-work of existing audio tracks. It's the same level of quality as the Obama video+audio stitch-work in Mr Robot.
- pjmlp 10y agoSo what else is new? This is how secret services always worked since they exist, yes even in democratic countries.
- zzzcpan 10y agoThe new thing is that more people are starting to understand what governments really do. And governments are gonna feel weaker, less in control and would have to resort to more non-"democratic" ways of doing business.
- cryoshon 10y agowhy do we permit their assault on our democracies? when was the last time a citizen benefitted from the surveillance of people not suspected of any crime? if we know abuses are inevitable and will be hidden from us, why not slash their funding/imprison them/restructure their activities to be too compartmentalizad to hurt the public in this fashion?
- pjmlp 10y agoBecause playing by the rules isn't always possible. It only works in movies.
- mtgx 10y agoBribery and corruption are also "not new". Should we stop fighting those altogether, too?
- pjmlp 10y agoAre we fighting them? Those terms have very different meanings depending on the country and social level of the ones doing it.
- wongarsu 10y agoSo just because banks have always been robbed we should allow bank robberies to continue? Intelligence agencies have to obey the law, just like every other government agency. We can make exceptions for them within the law, but that has to go through the usual legislative processes. If they just ignore our laws that's a problem we should attempt to fix.
- Sylos 10y agoI would have hoped that we would last longer, given how many people here (including Angela Merkel) had suffered from the Stasi, but I guess not.
- hutzlibu 10y agoCitation needed, that Merkel had suffered from Stasi, too. Afaik, she was doing well, within the system.
- Sylos 10y agoI meant that she lived in the DDR and knew what others were going through. She herself was most likely doing fine, as she was a scientist, which the DDR desperately needed to keep up their fassade of being more progressive than the Western part of Germany.
- solatic 10y agoYou all need to understand... in the age of the Internet, every governmental body which deals with computers under any veil of secrecy/classification inevitably uses that veil of secrecy or classification to break the law. Every. Single. One. It's just too easy for them not to. The incentives are stacked against them to keep the law. There are too many internal controls that are necessary to pass in order to obey the law, so just like in any other human endeavor, management will follow the path of least resistance. They are protected by national security / classification law from anybody finding out. If it leaks anyway that they broke the law? Nobody will be fired or sent to jail, and the whistle-blower will be tried for treason for leaking classified information. If we, as citizens, abhor this behavior - we must fix the incentives. There is no other way.
- dmix 10y agoProfessional criminals lives depend entirely on their ability to conceal their crimes, or more specially their connection to crimes. It's not surprising that the intel community who are the very best in the world at concealment and containment would use that same skillset to circumvent already ineffective control systems that limit their activity. Which is why they do whatever they want. For example, Snowden didnt even have access to Tao or high level projects thanks to compartmentalization. Who knows how much deeper this stuff goes. I'd imagine we only got access to the low-hanging fruit of the NSA operations. The real dirty stuff would be in the CNE departments where they get total control of whomevers machines they want.
- giardini 10y agoSo will this force any change in the behavior of the BND?
- plandis 10y agoWhat country doesn't spy and try to delicately skate around the law? Everyone was surprised with US spying but honestly, why isn't every country trying to or actively doing that too?
- Kerrygarry 10y agoRobinson.buckle @ yahoo .com just saved my marriage, My husband is back...
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