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The US Constitution is mostly the same. If you're in the United States, regardless of your nationality, you have the right to free speech, the right to remain silent when questioned by police, the right to demand a search warrant before letting the police into your home or automobile, the right to purchase and possess firearms, the right to espouse whatever political opinions you may have, and even the right to refuse to quarter troops in your home. You don't even have all of those rights in Germany!

Spying is a corner case. Every country spies on every other country. Do the Germans wiretap international communications? Absolutely: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesnachrichtendienst Have they ever spied on their own people? Even worse: their own journalists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundesnachrichtendienst#Spying_...

The question is what "spying on other countries" actually looks like, and one of the legal barriers is that, well, if you're spying on Americans in America then you're not really spying on other countries at all, so let's make a rule that US citizens are exempt from NSA or CIA surveillance. Does this mean US citizens are exempt from being spied on? Of course not! That's what the FBI is for!

If there's a human right of "not being spied upon", it's violated by every country that spies. Germany is factually one of them.

There is a right to privacy (in case of the German constitution literally, by the way). And I take issue with anyone saying that violating the privacy of non-citizens is totally ok.

I do not want to claim any kind of superiority – that is very clearly not the case. The German government consists of many, many people who do not respect privacy at all and are disgusting scumbags. No question about that.

I just want to say that from a moral point of view the statement that it’s ok that non-citizens have no right to privacy is totally bankrupt and idiotic.

If you interpret the right to privacy to entail never having foreign intelligence agencies, you take a position that almost no government in the world actually follows, because almost every national government has foreign intelligence agencies. Holding up Germany as a counterexample on this issue is, in your words, factually wrong.

Oh, and by the way, breaking moral rules is a hell of a good reason to raise outrage. I don’t understand why you seem to think that something being legal is reason to not be outraged.

IMHO something I deem immoral being legal and happening is actually worse than it "just" happening. It's adding insult to injury, if you will, and of course it makes it much more likely to happen again, or even more and more.

I'm not sure exactly what your referencing, but if you are talking about all the stuff that's been going down in the U.S., Glenn Greenwald said at the Socialism Conference yesterday that a lot of what's going on isn't legal and has been ruled unconstitutional in the secret FISA court.

Link to video: http://youtu.be/Uulv4ve6RJ8

Skip to 45:00 and watch for a couple minutes if you're interested in hearing just that. Though if you have time I recommend watching the whole thing.

I'm not sure exactly what your referencing

What I said was general, I wasn't thinking of anything in particular.. but thanks for that link, I will be sure to listen to it in full when I have time.

What about the Dutch government, and the Swedish government, U.K. government, and Canada, etc.? The EU itself has a data retention law that Germany doesn't follow, but don't the rest of the EU member nations participate?

FWIW I do feel that American citizens should have to 'participate' just as much in these schemes as the rest of the world, if these schemes are to exist at all.

I suppose what I can't figure out is why the reaction is devoted solely at the U.S., when it seems Germany is the only major Western society that cares that deeply about it.

Make clear what you mean by 'nationalism' before you use perjorative words like pest - as if your assertion is axiomatic.

If you have a definition by which it's not a pest, I'd love to hear it, honestly.

Wikipedia:

Nationalism is a belief, creed or political ideology that involves a voluntary accepted or coercively imposed mode of identification with individual persons and a nation.

George Orwell:

http://www.george-orwell.org/Notes_on_Nationalism/0.html

I'd say identifying with anything other than oneself is even bigger a delusion than identifying with oneself, and since it's so widespread, calling it a pest is actually polite.

You don’t have to agree with me. That was just an aside and certainly my personal opinion. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the main point I was making.

I do think, though, that nation states are a fundamentally bad model for governance and both too large and too small. I’m not sure what could replace them (and not a fan of pre-nation governance models), though something like the EU can provide some (tiny and obviously deeply flawed) hints at how to approach the “too small” problem, I’m not so sure what to do about the “too large” problem.