stannol

ß is not equivalent to ss, that's just plain wrong. Simple example: "In Maßen" means "in moderation" while "In Massen" means "en masse".

They're completely banned on the Autobahn and even on normal roads all ads have to be approved.

Not true at all. There are not many high profile IT companies in Germany, true. But there are countless companies that produce A TON of software (Daimler, Siemens, Bosch, ThyssenKrupp, Continental, Schaeffler, Infineon, EADS, Rohde+Schwarz to name only a few). This software is crucial to industries all around the world, it just isn't visible like things coming from Microsoft et al.

Interesting article, but saying Munich is conservative is just plain wrong. Munich is to Bavaria what Austin is to Texas, it's as liberal as it gets.

All of the companies you mentioned are owned by huge corporations (Fiat, Ford, Volkswagen). I can't speak for the others but Lamborghini and Bugatti would have ceased to exist a long time ago if it weren't for VW.

The article is wrong. They already aired a short segment of the nterview and Siemens was just used as an example by the interviewer. Snowden said something like "The US intelligence agencies would spy on Siemens if they had information that could be exploited by American corporations even if said information had nothing to do with national security". At no point did he claim that specifically Siemens was affected.

I've lived near a US base in Germany all my life (I can actually see the "border" from my house) and I can't think of any way to "get in trouble" by showing up nearby. The only way to get in trouble here is to actually enter the base without permission.