{"id":5266,"date":"2013-07-16T13:43:52","date_gmt":"2013-07-16T19:43:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5266"},"modified":"2013-07-16T13:43:52","modified_gmt":"2013-07-16T19:43:52","slug":"we-have-good-cause-to-abhor-the-surveillance-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5266","title":{"rendered":"We have good cause to abhor the surveillance state"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A href=\"http:\/\/www.ft.com\/intl\/cms\/s\/0\/d9818d66-ed75-11e2-8d7c-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2ZEPxASX7\">Constanze Stelzenm\u00fcller<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Ah, German hypocrisy! During the cold war, you marched waving \u201cAmi, Go Home\u201d placards, but still let us protect you against the Soviets. Now you moan self-righteously about the National Security Agency and GCHQ reading your emails and listening to your mobile phone. You don\u2019t acknowledge that \u2013 unlike the US or the UK \u2013 you have had no domestic terror attack in the past 10 years. That\u2019s because we gave you information to prevent them; guess where we got it? Anyway, your Federal Intelligence Service snoops as much as it can. Except it can\u2019t do that much. Whereas we \u2013 oh yes, we scan! Could it be that you\u2019re jealous?<\/p>\n<p>That about sums up the American and British response to the uproar about alleged US and UK spying activities in Germany revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.<\/p>\n<p>Sorry, friends: things are not that simple. This topic touches on historical sensitivities here. Our grandparents\u2019 generation feared the early-morning knock of the Gestapo. During the cold war, West and East Germans alike were aware that their divided country was crawling with spooks of all denominations. We recognised that mutually assured espionage helped prop up the bipolar balance of power. (It also made for some superb spy thrillers.) Still, no one misses the sombre paranoia, reinforced in and after the 1970s by the ramping up of West Germany\u2019s domestic intelligence services in response to homegrown terrorism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Constanze Stelzenm\u00fcller: Ah, German hypocrisy! During the cold war, you marched waving \u201cAmi, Go Home\u201d placards, but still let us protect you against the Soviets. Now you moan self-righteously about the National Security Agency and GCHQ reading your emails and listening to your mobile phone. You don\u2019t acknowledge that \u2013 unlike the US or the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5266"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5266"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5266\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}