Secret Documents: NSA monitored 500 million connections in Germany

It might as well be called the 4chan party.

I wish it was just that. But you don't need the media to get the full drama experience. Their twitter flame wars are famous and the fall-out from certain actions (like devastating a congress centre and blowing up the bill to over 20k eur where initially 1700 eur were planned as expenses) can be read in their official wikis.

I was a member in the SPD party (some of the bigger German parties) some years ago and quit shortly after becoming a member because it was all about internal power struggles - even with a local 'branch' in a 30k pop town. I decided politics wasn't for me. I had better things to do than wasting them on bullshit.

Then after I got invited by a friend to come along to one of their meetings (for a 250k pop city) I decided to give politics a second chance. And I swear - it was the same like what I had experienced before with the SPD. Only there were significantly more mobile computing devices around. It was 90% about administration (who and how should do what and why that someone was a bad choice mixed in with some feminism/sexism debate) and the real issues (data retention, privacy, etc) weren't even discussed.

In politics I think there are many people who do care about the core issues - but there are far too many egomaniac assholes around destroying every constructive discussion with their bullshit. And after what I've seen I don't believe that the pirate party is immune to that.

For example, they did recreate a lot of the problems voting machines have with their 'liquid feedback' system, and when called out on that answered that they do not know, but since 1337 pirate party instead of evil(TM) Diebold suggested it, there is surely a way. ( And to rant a bit, at their last party convention they did petition that the parliament publishes their schedule on the INTERNET, which the parliament of course does. But there is no one left in the pirates who is able to google.)

So by now I tend to think of the German pirate party as the party of cargo cult modern, in the sense that modern does not mean a opinion informed by deep technical understanding, but modern in the sense of the latest Techcrunsh fad, independent if that is Instagram, Stasibook or Anonymous.

With Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger they also have the last privacy wall before the Constitutional Court.

They of course have absolutly no problems with corporate data mining...

That would be a bit ironic, given that Die Linke includes former PDS.

(for those not following German politics: PDS was "Party for Democratic Socialism", formed from the remains of the old "SED" - Socialist Unity Party, better known as the ruling party of DDR and originators of Stasi)

Look at the table on the bottom [1]. Note that the data is a little bit older and Bild is yellow press and recently introduced a pay wall.

If a topic is prominent on the Spiegel homepage mainstream Germany will talk about it.

[1] http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=auto&tl=en&u=ht...

Maybe "country of interest"?

Paul Weston - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG77qpLi4oc

There are a lot of people in the UK (near or in the parts that are "diverse", or "multicultural") that will disagree with you about the disproportionate amount of crime (murder, rape, mugging, etc) and destruction that is committed by the non-"White British", and the effects this has on the stability and prosperity of the country (and more than likely so will basic crime statistics).

Just a few months ago there was a couple of non-"White British" guys trying to cut off a guy's head with a knife, hands covered in blood, while proclaiming something about their religion, god, and kin, on camera and in front of witnesses.

> Also worth noting is that across the UK the Muslims only make up 2.7% of the population

Yes. The fastest growing demographic in the country that will blow up in just a decade or two...

It's not the 2 year olds you have to worry about, nor the 80 year olds, it's the 16-2x age group.

I haven't seen an argument why we shouldn't extend human rights to Muslims. And yes, what most people who talk about muslims committing more crimes on average (which is true, if you restrict it to the relative proportions and avoid any proper statistical analysis) are talking about is a violation of constitutional rights:

It's impossible to punish millions of people for the crimes of the few.

I'm also stressing that I don't find the surveillance "surprising", while I don't condone it in any way.

And yes, the US army bases in Germany are left overs from the allied occupation after WW II

As with any other country with a large standing army (Germany sits somewhere between South Korea and France in terms of capabilities), it would probably begin with large scale air strikes with stealth bombers against military targets. Within the first 4 hours, most militarized airfields and radar installations would be destroyed. The ground forces would invade from probably Italy and Poland, both highly US dependent states, assuming that France and the UK would stay neutral in such an attack. You'd probably see some guerrilla warfare because the Germans are strong-willed, but the vast majority of the population is westernized enough to not put up a real fight. But none of this would happen until the US has at least 2 carriers in the Baltic Sea, so Germany would definitely have advance warning, and hopefully the foresight to negotiate.

Germany has no nuclear deterrent, as it simply hosts US missiles by way of NATO [2].

EDIT: This spells it out pretty clearly, the US has more helicopters than Germany has tanks ships and planes combined: http://www.globalfirepower.com/countries-comparison-detail.a...

1. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/ 2. http://www.rusi.org/publications/occasionalpapers/ref:O4B991...

Which is actually one of the reasons they seem so incompetent, they're not very good at that. [also, did you perchance confuse the BND with the Verfassungsschutz? Not that it matters, the Verfassungsschutz is probably worse than the BND, they help Neonazis more than harming them] Also, BND officials say some hilarious stuff when it comes to computers.