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Comment by akie | Hacker News Reader

Love how they use sentences like "Germans are particularly sensitive to electronic surveillance" and "(their) hard line on data transfers has drawn the ire of" to make it sound as if the Germans are the unreasonable ones here.

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Yes, and it's also interesting that the "ire" they've drawn is from the Director General of Digital Europe, a business association made up of dozens of large companies including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Oracle. Might be a conflict of interest there (understatement).

me, too. I think that we (Germany) are as bad as others (U.S.), however we do so, as we are angels, but we definitely aren't. I also think that the german government is way more corrupt and broke some surveillance rules as well as the us did

There is also a perceived threat of a threat as well though. This is how I imagine the conversation:

  NSA: We need your data feeds in order to protect you 
       using our super-duper 'big data' intel tools. Install
       these black boxes and we'll tell you when you are 
       under imminent threat.

  BND: Um, not sure about this. Not sure it might be
       illegal?

  NSA: You wouldn't want a terrorist attack like the one in 
       Madrid, or London on German soil would you?

  BND: Sigh, give us the black boxes then.

  NSA: Oh oops slight porky... they are already installed. We 
       just needed your permission.

You imagine NSA would use British slang? ;) (I had to look up what 'porky' meant in this context. Apparently 'very big lie', and perhaps rhyming slang for porky pie => lie.)

One of the problems of being British (a crime I suspect the GP of) is you don't always know what is British slang

Perhaps next our intrepid NSA agent will pull a cooldrink from the cubbyhole when the bakkie stops at the robot.

That's South African slang in case anyone's wondering.

Yeah, that supposed NSA guy is even inexplicably using single quotes.

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