German Federal Intelligence Service BND Violates Laws And Constitution

Yes, 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.

Professional 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.

> "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 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Underground

Well, 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.

What 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.

>> "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

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

Citation needed, that Merkel had suffered from Stasi, too. Afaik, she was doing well, within the system.

> 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-crim...

A copyright violation is not robbery and neither is this

Though of course their overreach should be questioned

So 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.

why 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?

The 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.

Bribery and corruption are also "not new". Should we stop fighting those altogether, too?

considering 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.

You'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.

I 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.

Everything "works". Even our sun going supernova "works". The question is, towards what end.