Cornelius Rahn and Leon Mangasarian
By Cornelius Rahn and Leon Mangasarian
Willi Kuhlmann remembers the day the Berlin Wall was erected on August 13, 1961, and how the system of spying on East German citizens by secret police known as the Stasi intensified.
His experience as a border guard along the Wall that divided Germany’s capital city for 28 years makes him mistrustful of the data-gathering carried out by the US National Security Agency, revealed in a series of disclosures to publications including Germany’s Der Spiegel by fugitive Edward Snowden in recent weeks.
Kuhlmann, 77, a retired forester, is among ordinary Germans who draw parallels between the NSA’s activities and the surveillance carried out by the Stasi. One in two of the country’s citizens regard Snowden as a hero, according to a June 29 survey of 504 people by Emnid for Bild am Sonntag newspaper.
“You don’t spy like that on your friends,” said Kuhlmann in a telephone interview.
Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose government has rejected the leaker’s application for asylum to Germany, spoke with US President Barack Obama over the phone last week after Der Spiegel reported that the NSA spied on German citizens and European diplomats. Germany was the top destination among European countries for the intelligence gathering, with about 500 million phone calls, e-mails and SMS being monitored and recorded by the NSA every month, the magazine said. Snowden, who has been offered legal and logistical support by anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks as he faced US requests for extradition in Hong Kong and Russia, also said NSA officials were “in bed together with the Germans.” According to Der Spiegel, the NSA has a partnership with Germany’s foreign intelligence service, or BND, with the Americans providing “analysis tools” for the BND to use as it monitors streams of data passing through Germany.
Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich was to to join high-level talks yesterday in the United States about Snowden’s revelations as European Union and US officials seek to clarify the allegations. Friedrich is scheduled to meet today with Attorney General Eric Holder and presidential adviser Lisa Monaco in Washington.
“There’s nothing wrong about telling the truth,” said Janina Cieply, 22, an anthropology student at Berlin’s Free University. “It looks like the NSA picked up where the Stasi left off. Of course this is a delicate topic in Germany, and rightfully so. It’s the government’s duty to protect the people from such attacks.”
While some Germans voice their support for Snowden, people around the world are less willing to offer financial backing to WikiLeaks and causes such as Snowden’s. Mindful of state surveillance by the Stasi under communism and the Gestapo under the Nazis, Germans are more sensitive than people in other nations to the powers of surveillance by government agencies.
Communist East Germany’s Staatssicherheit, or Stasi secret police, was the regime’s enforcer whose motto was “Shield and Sword of the Party.” The Stasi had 93,000 full-time agents and at least 189,000 part-time informers in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell before the 1990 German reunification, Joerg Drieselmann, director of Berlin’s Stasi Museum, said in a phone interview. East Germany had a population of about 16.4 million in 1989.
“The Stasi is the ultimate expression of spying in Germany’s collective memory,” he said.
Drieselmann said 120 kilometers of Stasi files still exist and that this is thought to be 65 percent to 70 percent of the total files before the Stasi’s frantic shredding and burning of its archives shortly before the communist state’s collapse.
“We still can’t compare the Stasi with the NSA,” he said. “I certainly don’t want to even try to compare them as institutions but let’s be clear: the NSA has gathered vastly more information than the Stasi ever did.”
In an interview with Die Zeit newspaper published Wednesday, Merkel said she rejects any parallel between the Stasi and espionage practices of democratic states.
The Stasi legacy still resonates and was dramatised in a film “The Lives of Others,” about an agent spying on a writer and his lover, which won an Oscar for 2007 Best Foreign Language Film.
Germany has a long tradition of data protection laws dating to the 1970s. The state of Hesse introduced the first data protection law worldwide in 1970, according the Hesse State Commissioner for Data Protection website. In 1983, the country’s top court said Germany’s constitution grants individuals a right to “informational self-determination.” A system “in which citizens can no longer know who knows what and when and on which occasion about them,” is incompatible with the constitution, the judges ruled.
Kuhlmann, the former Berlin Wall border guard, said intelligence gathering today in democracies takes place under totally different — and much higher — standards than what he knew in the East Bloc under communism.
“Spies exist in every nation and today we need to keep close watch on terrorists and organized crime,” he said. “But we learned in East Germany that spying must be controlled, and in this case it doesn’t seem like it was.”
WP-BLOOMBERG
By Cornelius Rahn and Leon Mangasarian
Willi Kuhlmann remembers the day the Berlin Wall was erected on August 13, 1961, and how the system of spying on East German citizens by secret police known as the Stasi intensified.
His experience as a border guard along the Wall that divided Germany’s capital city for 28 years makes him mistrustful of the data-gathering carried out by the US National Security Agency, revealed in a series of disclosures to publications including Germany’s Der Spiegel by fugitive Edward Snowden in recent weeks.
Kuhlmann, 77, a retired forester, is among ordinary Germans who draw parallels between the NSA’s activities and the surveillance carried out by the Stasi. One in two of the country’s citizens regard Snowden as a hero, according to a June 29 survey of 504 people by Emnid for Bild am Sonntag newspaper.
“You don’t spy like that on your friends,” said Kuhlmann in a telephone interview.
Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose government has rejected the leaker’s application for asylum to Germany, spoke with US President Barack Obama over the phone last week after Der Spiegel reported that the NSA spied on German citizens and European diplomats. Germany was the top destination among European countries for the intelligence gathering, with about 500 million phone calls, e-mails and SMS being monitored and recorded by the NSA every month, the magazine said. Snowden, who has been offered legal and logistical support by anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks as he faced US requests for extradition in Hong Kong and Russia, also said NSA officials were “in bed together with the Germans.” According to Der Spiegel, the NSA has a partnership with Germany’s foreign intelligence service, or BND, with the Americans providing “analysis tools” for the BND to use as it monitors streams of data passing through Germany.
Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich was to to join high-level talks yesterday in the United States about Snowden’s revelations as European Union and US officials seek to clarify the allegations. Friedrich is scheduled to meet today with Attorney General Eric Holder and presidential adviser Lisa Monaco in Washington.
“There’s nothing wrong about telling the truth,” said Janina Cieply, 22, an anthropology student at Berlin’s Free University. “It looks like the NSA picked up where the Stasi left off. Of course this is a delicate topic in Germany, and rightfully so. It’s the government’s duty to protect the people from such attacks.”
While some Germans voice their support for Snowden, people around the world are less willing to offer financial backing to WikiLeaks and causes such as Snowden’s. Mindful of state surveillance by the Stasi under communism and the Gestapo under the Nazis, Germans are more sensitive than people in other nations to the powers of surveillance by government agencies.
Communist East Germany’s Staatssicherheit, or Stasi secret police, was the regime’s enforcer whose motto was “Shield and Sword of the Party.” The Stasi had 93,000 full-time agents and at least 189,000 part-time informers in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell before the 1990 German reunification, Joerg Drieselmann, director of Berlin’s Stasi Museum, said in a phone interview. East Germany had a population of about 16.4 million in 1989.
“The Stasi is the ultimate expression of spying in Germany’s collective memory,” he said.
Drieselmann said 120 kilometers of Stasi files still exist and that this is thought to be 65 percent to 70 percent of the total files before the Stasi’s frantic shredding and burning of its archives shortly before the communist state’s collapse.
“We still can’t compare the Stasi with the NSA,” he said. “I certainly don’t want to even try to compare them as institutions but let’s be clear: the NSA has gathered vastly more information than the Stasi ever did.”
In an interview with Die Zeit newspaper published Wednesday, Merkel said she rejects any parallel between the Stasi and espionage practices of democratic states.
The Stasi legacy still resonates and was dramatised in a film “The Lives of Others,” about an agent spying on a writer and his lover, which won an Oscar for 2007 Best Foreign Language Film.
Germany has a long tradition of data protection laws dating to the 1970s. The state of Hesse introduced the first data protection law worldwide in 1970, according the Hesse State Commissioner for Data Protection website. In 1983, the country’s top court said Germany’s constitution grants individuals a right to “informational self-determination.” A system “in which citizens can no longer know who knows what and when and on which occasion about them,” is incompatible with the constitution, the judges ruled.
Kuhlmann, the former Berlin Wall border guard, said intelligence gathering today in democracies takes place under totally different — and much higher — standards than what he knew in the East Bloc under communism.
“Spies exist in every nation and today we need to keep close watch on terrorists and organized crime,” he said. “But we learned in East Germany that spying must be controlled, and in this case it doesn’t seem like it was.”
WP-BLOOMBERG
