US bugged Merkel's phone from 2002 until 2013, report claims

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24690055

by Suraj-Sun • 13 years ago

197 88 13 years ago

bbc.co.uk

frank_boyd• 13 years ago

So, this time, at least grammatically speaking, Obama didn't lie when he said they were not spying on her.

I think we're making real progress here.

On the bright side, it's a good thing she's "on the list" as well, as this seems to be the only way to get her attention regarding the mass surveillance issue.

friendly_chap3• 13 years ago

Hypocrites indeed.

Hopefully humanity will come up with a way to replace these parasites called politicians.

I believe not even too many years later we will remember this era of humanity as the darkest of the dark ages.

throwaway98789• 13 years ago

I made this account entirely to remind you of the goddamn holocaust. Try not to lose all perspective, eh?

StavrosK2• 13 years ago

I envy your unbridled optimism.

rob05c8• 13 years ago

the darkest of the dark ages

I agree this is a dark age for freedom, but to put things in perspective: Mao, Lenin, The Inquisition, Genghis Khan, Victorian Imperialism, Feudalism.

The current US Congress, the CIA, Hoover's FBI, et al may be tyrannical, but Obama is no Mao.

lispm• 13 years ago

Merkel got the 'freedom' medal from Obama.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/06/07/remark...

maak3• 13 years ago

... your point?

growupkids6• 13 years ago

That maybe she's pretending to be mad, but knows this sort of thing goes on and everyone pretends it doesn't?

trapnii• 13 years ago

his point probably: because Obama exactly knows what she's doing. ;)

fosap2• 13 years ago

She got a medal for fighting a surveillance state (historically quite questionable, btw) by a Obama. And now she has to learn that Obama is no better.

molecule• 13 years ago

Mrs Merkel - an Americophile who was awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011 - is said to be shocked that Washington may have engaged in the sort of spying she had to endure growing up in Communist East Germany.

though she expressed no such outrage when it was revealed that the NSA was conducting similar surveillance on German citizens.

rhizome• 13 years ago

I have a suspicion that the "world leaders bin tapped" storyline is intended to set the stage for a "hey we're all in this together" kumbaya agreement where the leaders substitute their judgement for ours and allow the surveillance to continue.

growupkids6• 13 years ago

Or when the Chinese were caught doing the same thing.

Volpe4• 13 years ago

Which incident was that?

fosap2• 13 years ago

I don't know what you are referring to. But for a americanophile who sees the USA as the leader of the free world and protector of human rights that a way more shocking than if a known police state does it. Et tu, Brute?

maak3• 13 years ago

Ugh, so let's stifle the media on the subject? The fact that the leader of a powerful nation is making any sort of protest should be lauded by the tech community.

darklajid2• 13 years ago

See elsewhere in this thread: No.

It would've been 'laudable' (really? Isn't the word we're going for 'expected' instead?) if she'd have reacted in any decent way after we learned about the general targeting of Germany and German citizens. At THAT point she was supposed to shout/complain/make a fuss.

Thing is - she really didn't. NOW, after learning that she, herself, was a target for some time, the situation changed. Which is crap, disgusting and just showing how detached that person is from (the tech community's) reality.

There's no reason to clap here.

camus22• 13 years ago

What people need to understand is america is not spying just for political reasons or "national security". NSA is also basically a spying agency for hire , used by US private corporations to win contracts (weapons,it,....) or predict the foreign competitor next move (just like the CIA served private interests in Latin America, just google United Fruits and Guatemala... ).

RWeaver• 13 years ago

Source?

Volpe4• 13 years ago

I thought the german government immediately asked for the US government to "clarify" it's intelligence gathering in germany.

That's about as 'outraged' as they can get isn't it?

Personal phone calls make sense, when the spying is personal.

darklajid2• 13 years ago

Nope, the German government actually considered that case closed - "no rights were violated" is an approximation of the statement they issued.

NOW this eloquent girl representing my home country changes her attitude and there's a big 'HOW COULD THEY' going around. Before that? Not so much.

So she's now (ignoring the gazillion other reasons) fueling gags about her finally realizing that she's part of 'the German people'. Sarcastic publications claim (in jest, of course) that Merkel is 'outraged to be treated like a common German'.

Bottom line: Crappy government, they didn't care a damn before and needed to be directly targeted to wake up.

0p0p• 13 years ago

President Barack Obama promised Mrs Merkel he knew nothing of the alleged phone monitoring, the magazine reports. He apologised to the German chancellor, it said.

Plausible deniability?!?

Wonder what else he "didn't know" and how he is justified in making sweepings statements if he is not sufficiently informed. It can't be "Don't worry, trust me" and "Oops, I didn't know" simultaneously.

MatthewPhillips• 13 years ago

I haven't been following the story close enough, but he never apologized for spying on U.S. citizens, he defended that, right?

growupkids6• 13 years ago

Politician move #178, also know as the "Reagan Shim Sham": just say you don't know anything about it.

SideburnsOfDoom2• 13 years ago

It's worth remembering that Barack Obama was not president of the US until 2008. It's safe to assume that in 2002 he was the subject of, not the instigator of, surveillance.

sockypuppy• 13 years ago

Wonder what else [Obama] "didn't know"

Here's a laundry list from a libertarian / conservative commentator who often says insightful things even when I disagree with him:

[Obama] was himself clueless as to the extent and severity of the problems in his signature legislation. Two weeks after the Benghazi massacre, he was still parroting the Susan Rice line about anti-Islamic videos, which the CIA knew within hours had had nothing to do with the murder of Ambassador Stevens.

Obama had no idea for three years his IRS might be slow-walking Tea Party applications for tax exemptions. He wasn’t in the loop about Eric Holder’s phone taps on Fox News or the Associated Press.

Nobody told him. The president has not been more deeply implicated in the scandals since re-election because he could credibly say, "How was I supposed to know what was going on?"

Source: http://buchanan.org/blog/queen-obamaland-5957

rdtsc• 13 years ago

That is not a bad response from his position. From say a game theoretic point of view.

Imagine is he is not the president but say a mafia boss, maybe a powerful drug lord. And it turns out one of the drug mules for a competing drug gangs gets murdered by Obama's men. Now, war is about to start. And all the drug lords have a meeting. Obama can claim he didn't personally order the murder and he didn't know it was about to happen. He has men working for him who receive general instruction like "keep the product flowing no matter what cost" with specifically no concrete instruction (especially in written form). Now that protects him. If worse comes to worse, he can simply replace a scapegoat low level employee and keep the organization going forward. The same modus operandi is probably at play with regard to a lot of this stuff from the White House.

hcarvalhoalves• 13 years ago

OT: What a creativity for analogies.

devcpp• 13 years ago

On the other hand, the POTUS is at least supposed to look powerful in the eyes of the citizens. By recognizing that he doesn't know (and can't know) what's going on, he is announcing to the world that he is a puppet and that the POTUS is nothing but a servant to higher interests.

Bad move by the puppet masters.

throwaway9848• 13 years ago

I'm shocked - shocked - to find that gambling is going on in here!

SideburnsOfDoom2• 13 years ago

There was an article that made this same comparison recently, and discussed why it doesn't matter: http://crookedtimber.org/2013/10/23/the-politics-of-hypocris...

What is interesting is not whether France (or Mexico, or Brazil, or Germany) is being hypocritical in pretending to be shocked at what the US is doing. It’s whether their response (hypocritical as it may be) has real political consequences. And it surely does

zurn• 13 years ago

The UKUSA intelligence aparatus has been long used as a justification to increase powers of spy agencies in other countries. For allies it's the perceived political returns when they deliver more intelligence and get in exchange get on the good side of USA's foreign policy, and for others it's the perceived need to keep up in the arms race.

patrickg_zill2• 13 years ago

Not just USA had access to the info - remember that it came out that the USA was giving raw feeds to Israel's intelligence service also.... http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-americans-p...

alexqgb• 13 years ago

She's "angry", but not angry enough to grant Snowden asylum.

maak3• 13 years ago

At least somebody with influence is getting angry at all.

growupkids6• 13 years ago

It's political theatre. She's not mad, she playing to her audience.

growupkids6• 13 years ago

Think the Russians hope no one notices how quiet they are right now about all this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Soviet_and_Russian_e...

According to former GRU Colonel Stanislav Lunev, "SVR and GRU (Russia's external and military intelligence agencies, respectively) are operating against the U.S. in a much more active manner than they were during even the hottest days of the Cold War"

camus22• 13 years ago

Russia doesnt boast about being the "Greatest democracy and the Leader of the free world".

skidoo2• 13 years ago

If the shoe were on the other foot, there'd be bloody hell to pay.

ams6110• 13 years ago

I'm quite sure there are many governments spying (or trying to apy) on Obama's cell phone, including European governments. To expect otherwise is naive and that's why his personal electronic devices are highly secured.

skidoo2• 13 years ago

I'm not naive, but you did misspell "spy".

diego_moita• 13 years ago

Disclaimer: Brazilian here

Most comments I've seen about this issue seem very American, going along the lines of "stop the hypocrisy, everybody does it". It is useless to argue against such view, cynicism is usually unpermeable to arguments.

However, regardless if "everybody does it" or not this story will have implications. It is a very strong argument for a new kind of walled garden: the nationally restricted Internet. We should expect a strong growth of the China-style Internet.

This surveillance is now seen in Latin America as a threat from the classic "American Imperialism". In the name of "protection" from real or imaginary dangers politicians, bureaucrats and autocrats will enforce Internet monitoring within a lot of countries. Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, expect a lot of trouble.

rob05c8• 13 years ago

I fear Tyrannical Governments will create an "American Internet," a "Chinese Internet," a "European Internet," and a "Rest-of-the-world Internet."

It will happen quietly, and no one outside the tech community will know until it's too late.

bcoates• 13 years ago

If that's the worst case scenario we're doing pretty OK. The nationalist networks will presumably be like the PSTN in the 90s: ubiquitous, reliable, safe but perceived as safer than it is, overpriced, limited, behind. All the interesting stuff will happen over tunnels to the Internet Internet.

zby• 13 years ago

My little theory is that this can help Europe to become a player in the Internet. The point is that individual European countries cannot create their own internet - they are too small and too much interconnected (especially if they are in the European Union) - but on the other hand they are separate countries. The effect I would like to see is that they develop ways how to be trustworthy and also how to check if your partner is reliable. First between themselves - then their solutions will be attractive to the whole world. Which router would you trust - one from China, one from the USA or one from Germany - when you know that Germany also exports the routers to France and UK and they check them?

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

This is a good point, one of the outcomes of this mess might be more control over internets than less control. At some point we'll need to dust off our uucp code to get back to a more independent network.

That said, when I was at USC and the 'net' was ARPANet and the Fido was just the name of a dog, it was very much a 'controlled' net with no spam (your host got detached) or commercial speech (same punishment). Which made for a pretty sterile (if geeky experience). When Berkeley and PARC started to create gateways between those 'unwashed' nodes and the ARPAnet it was quite different. I could easily see a call to go more 'milnet' on the public infrastructure with the monitoring overt and 'known' like it was on ARPAnet in the same of security. That would be a bad outcome in my opinion.

bane• 13 years ago

If I were a surveillance apparatus listening in on foreign internets, tighter local control is exactly what I'd want. I'd only have to hack into the national firewall to listen in on data rather than thousands or millions of individual networks.

ja27• 13 years ago

I think the outrage isn't that we (Americans) did it. The pros know we spy on everything we can, all the time. But the outrage is that now there are newspapers all over the world telling John Q. Public (Johan Q. Public?) what happened. That puts pressure on Merkel from her own citizens. So the Americans will take their public lumps, apologize, and everyone will get back to business.

malandrew3• 13 years ago

I too fear the China-style internet as a response. However there are alternative responses which may be beneficial if we take a constructive approach. I see no better time than now for many countries to get behind the ideas of Eben Moglen and actively fund open source work in the basic hardware and software than all countries need. Some 21 countries are getting together to challenge the US at the UN. I would love it if these same 21 countries put money where their mouth is and actively funded the thousands of excellent independent open source developers who would love to actively create fully free and open-source basic software and hardware full time. These individuals are not hard to identify and support. Give them the money to quit their day jobs and build FOSS full time.

rockyleal• 13 years ago

Disclaimer: Colombian here

It makes no sense to use quotation marks around the term American Imperialism, as if it wasn't real. That the US is an empire is beyond question, and Snowden has shown that it has turned the internet into an unprecedented tool for global control.

No statesman in their right mind would allow a foreign power to freely operate such a tool undisturbed in their territory/population. Internet sovereignty should be a priority of any government interested in preserving at least some degree of national autonomy, and indeed neglecting to so after what has been made public would be either a sign of great weakness or of being a US-puppet government... or both. The later is the case of my government. The countries that have complained louder are indeed the countries with some degree of power.

Speaking of the Chinese, I think that Snowden has only proved that there is actually a lot to learn from them. They have been the smartest ones since the begining, when early on they realised the nature of Google, Facebook and the like, and refused to let their population become addicted to giving all their information for US corporations to mine, store, analyze, profit, and provide intelligence to the US government.

Of course the above doesn't mean that the Internet should become surveilled by all local governments. The point is that the changes that should be made are toward a globally decentralised web should also not lead to locally operated surveillance, but the first does not imply the second. Surveillance is a political decision.

Chinese Internet is both more autonomous and more controlled. The first attribute is desireable while the second is not. I think it is key to keep in mind the distinction between those two things to make the best out of what is coming next.

znowi• 13 years ago

This surveillance is now seen in Latin America as a threat from the classic "American Imperialism"

Funny you mention that, cause Latin America has always been treated as a colony by the US. Recent detention of the Bolivian presidential plane is a good example of this arrogant attitude.

There's less prominent, but a similar condescending tone towards Europe, which for decades has been a puppet in the US geopolitical games. It could be tolerated while the threat of the evil commies existed. That threat is long gone, but militant ambitions of the US remained.

After the decade of wars, kidnappings, tortures, drones, and general world policing by the US, Europeans and other nations have had enough of it. I see a wave of anti-American, pro-nationalist sentiment on the rise. It is unfortunate, but rightly deserved.

The irony of it is that it is the military and security complex that will cash in on this development. More threats means more money and more power, which is less freedom for us, the people.

rob05c8• 13 years ago

As an American, I wish news agencies would stop conflating the US with the CIA. It suggests US citizens generally approve of their actions.

The "US" did not bug Merkel's phone. An agency under the Executive branch, which is above the Rule of Law, which is drunk with power and paranoia, who considers American citizens the enemy as much as foreigners, bugged Merkel's phone.

It would be like saying "Syria uses chemical weapons." The Syrian people had little to do with it, and the American people have little to do with this.

bilbo0s• 13 years ago

Well...

we voted in all the Representatives, Senators and Presidents who, in turn, voted to implement the programs though. We do have some culpability.

rob05c8• 13 years ago

The US is a two-party system. First Past The Post voting ensures a vote for a third party is wasted. No significant percentage of people will ever vote for a third party (excluding transition periods between party systems).

The current ruling party is widely recognized as less warmongering and less surveillance-state than the other party.

Americans aren't completely inculpable. Our societal inability to work together (see: Prisoner's Dilemma), combined with our unwillingness to risk contentment, contributes.

But I fail to see how American citizens have any real say in the government. We present a "democracy," but the two-party system is a thinly veiled autocracy.

kamjam• 13 years ago

As a non-American, I have no rights in your country and my views no not count for diddly-squat. In fact, the NSA surveillance are specifically supposed to target at me as a non-American.

So as an America, if you do not approve of their actions then you need to do something about it. You succeeded in one revolution, maybe it is time for another.

rob05c8• 13 years ago

I'm not sure whether I agree. I don't generally believe in violence.

But the average American won't rebel unless they are actually starving, no matter how much they're repressed. As long as they have their McDonald's and Reality TV, they aren't willing to die over a little warrantless wiretapping.

"Bread and Circuses" is far older than America.

Personally, I simply can't afford it. I have to work 9 hours a day, and even if I had the time, a trip to march on Washington DC is very expensive. I suspect most Americans that care are the same.

Sagat2• 13 years ago

It's too easy to claim that citizens are not involved in what the government is doing. One reason these agencies are so bold is because Americans themselves are completely dismissive of the rights of foreigners, thanks to the old manifest destiny attitude.

sethbannon• 13 years ago

As an American, I'm deeply embarrassed by this. Outrage will not stop the spying program, however. Action will: https://stopwatching.us

topynate• 13 years ago

Having accurately assessed the likely effects of the programme's exposure, it seems very dumb to proceed with it. What could the NSA learn that would outweigh having Germany decide that America wasn't actually a friendly, trustworthy country, as it has presumably now done? Don't ignore either that by recognizing the programme as a betrayal while proceeding with it, the NSA admits to being utterly amoral in a way that can't be walked back from. The only saving grace is that the programme started in 2003; you could almost plead collective insanity given what American foreign policy looked like at that time.

csense• 13 years ago

It seems naive not to believe that other countries' intelligence services do the same, or would do so if they had the technology.

This doesn't make it right.

The reason I feel that we're justified in using the "but-everybody-else-does-it" argument to dismiss it from our concern at the moment, is that it attempts to redirect the public outrage from a major problem (NSA spying on basically everyone) to a much more minor problem (NSA spying on head of a foreign state).

Imagine the (hypothetical) case where a particular state's police force is taking fire due to the police breaking up a properly permitted, legal, peaceful rally using excessive force.

It later comes out that the police officers of the department in question regularly disobey the speed limit and sometimes run stop signs.

To be sure, police officers speeding is not something they should be doing; it's wrong and unethical to do that.

But police officers speeding is a much less serious problem than police officers depriving the people of their right to peacefully assemble and petition their government for redress of grievances.

And if the media and the audience's focus immediately goes from the more important story (unlawfully breaking up peaceful rallies and excessive use of force) to the less important story (police officers sometimes exceed the speed limit when they're not supposed to), it's bad because it means the serious problem is no longer getting the attention it deserves.

mahranch• 13 years ago

I'm going to go against the grain here and say that it's not just that "everyone does it", it's more about the fact that everyone will do it, regardless of the circumstances.

Consider for a moment what would happen if the U.S. stopped all its foreign & domestic spying. What would happen? Do you think China will stop their spy programs? How about Russia? The UK? The rest of Europe?

No. The U.S. would be at a severe disadvantage when it comes to intelligence. It's like an arms race, except instead of weapons, it's knowledge. Just because one player quits or gets caught, doesn't mean everyone else will stop. In fact, it would be to their advantage if a few players left the table.

That's why I find this whole spying thing nonsense. It's one thing to spy on regular citizens, but it's another to spy on targets (like Angela Merkel) who are political actors and/or heads of state. It should be expected.

LekkoscPiwa• 13 years ago

The pace at which the USA destroys the remainders of its credibility is astonishing.

AustinLin• 13 years ago

Sometimes I wish the gov't would just come out and say what everyone is thinking:

Yep we are spying on you, (insert name of foreign leader), just like you are trying to spy on our leaders.

There are good arguments to be made against mass surveillance of the internet at large, but expecting that countries will stop spying on each other anytime soon is plain stupid.

grey-area2• 13 years ago

It started in 2002, Merkel was elected as Chancellor in 2005, that implies they are watching for up and coming politicians (she was CDU leader in 2002). I did find it interesting that the NSA admitted also collecting information from Washington DC in 2008 (an election year), the assurances that this was an accident are sounding more and more hollow, and the implications are frightening for a functioning democracy.

This, along with the Airbus, Petrobras and Belgacom revelations, makes it clear that surveillance is not targeting terrorists or part of the war on terror - it is engaged in for economic and political advantage, even against allies. That's quite a serious breach of trust.

"President Barack Obama promised Mrs Merkel he knew nothing of the alleged phone monitoring"

I can't decide which is more damning, that he know about it, and didn't stop it, or that he knew nothing about it, and the NSA takes it upon themselves to monitor the communications of allied politicians and interfere in other nations. Either way his reputation and his promises are meaningless now.

Along with being used by the US, raw intercept information is also shared with other allies of the US like Isreal and the UK, potentially damaging its European allies by giving out secret information to third parties, and I find it hard to believe given the lack of security the Snowden and Manning leaks highlighted, that Russia and China also don't have access to much of this intel through the many private contractors with security clearance.

While it is somewhat hypocritical of Merkel to be outraged by this and not by the widespread surveillance of her citizens, I'm pleased that this story has at last triggered such a virulent reaction in European politicians. The best thing she could do now in response is to offer Snowden asylum in Germany, and allow him to speak openly about the US security state - I do believe that would be in the interests of all the citizens of the world, if not of their leaders.

The blowback from this affair is just starting to pick up pace - it's already taken US relations with South America to a new low, and is about to do the same in Europe. Hopefully it will lead to meaningful change.

US bugged Merkel's phone from 2002 until 2013, report claims

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