Abstract
Above: Protests against NSA surveillance, Frankfurt, 27 September 2013
Credit: David von Blohn/Rex Features
The scandal over US surveillance of the internet has led to a bizarre wave of cyber-nationalism in Germany, says
Deutsche Telekom, Germany’s national telecommunications giant, is working on a “national internet” to replace the present American-dominated system. It made the little-noticed announcement in October, a few weeks after the German general election. It says that a national internet will mean that emails and data will be transmitted only through German lines within Germany’s borders. The catchy slogan is “national routing”.
“The idea is that, contrary to today’s common practice, data from a German sender to a German recipient will not be sent through another country,” said Philipp Blank, Deutsche Telekom’s spokesman. He suggested that this national internet could ultimately be expanded to cover all the European countries that have signed up to the Schengen agreement on open borders.
Expert commentators are sceptical about the desire to keep the internet within national borders. They point out not only that it would be impracticable but that it is the model that dictatorships use.
Professor Niko Härting, a Berlin lawyer who specialises in internet law, says: “When Iran says it is building an Iranian internet we all say this is dictatorship. The more closed a system, the more easily it can be monitored.”
Yet German politicians have given a nod and a wink to the idea.
The reason for this sudden interest in keeping data from the outside world is obvious: the exposure by the American whistleblower Edward Snowden of the extensive monitoring of email and internet usage all over the world by the US National Security Agency (NSA), closely aided by Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).
Across Europe the story has perhaps had the greatest impact in Germany. The weekly magazine Der Spiegel has worked closely on Snowden’s material with the Guardian in London, publishing new revelations issue-by-issue. It estimates that the NSA has been recording up to 60 million German metadata connections per day, with millions of emails intercepted, items of data copied and phone calls recorded. It seems that Germany is the European country under closest scrutiny by the US and Britain – although, the NSA records also show that Germany counts only as a middle-ranking country for surveillance.
In left-wing kindergartens in Berlin, six-year-olds are learning about the bravery of Edward Snowden
Der Spiegel has been unrelenting in its coverage. Jakob Augstein, whose father Rudolf founded the magazine in 1947, used its pages to express his outrage at the “humiliation” and “powerlessness” exposed by Snowden’s revelations. “Once you get past all the rhetoric, what is the actual issue we’re dealing with here?” he asked in an editorial. “The United States has massively and systematically violated the civil rights of people who have no possibility of voting against its practices in elections. After all, the NSA and CIA and whatever the other organisations are called aren’t operating under German laws when they’re supposedly protecting the security of the free world.”
In August the controversy briefly threatened to derail Chancellor Angela Merkel’s re-election campaign. During the sole television debate between her and her Social Democrat challenger Peer Steinbrück, her only sticky moment came when she was asked about the NSA. Her reply typified the stonewalling that has been the German government’s preferred line. She said that she had no reason not to trust what the NSA and the American government had told her, and that no German law had been infringed. Nevertheless, she would gladly talk to the Americans about a data protection treaty.
The opposition Greens and Social Democrats belatedly and half-heartedly tried to get a debate on the issue in the Bundestag in the last sitting before the election, but were not successful. The leader of Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union in the Bundestag, Michael Grosse-Brömer, said there was “no evidence of mass surveillance” of German citizens and that the opposition had no interest in serious debate: they were simply “trying to make a scandal out of a subject where there is no scandal” for electoral purposes.
But if Merkel and her allies – and some of her opponents – hoped that the story would disappear after the election, they were soon disappointed. Within a month of her victory in September, Der Spiegel reported that German intelligence sources had raised the possibility that Merkel’s mobile phone had been tapped by the NSA. The story was sufficiently plausible for her to call US President Barack Obama personally to demand an explanation.
Many Germans have been deeply distressed by the exposure of American and British surveillance, with opinion polls showing strong support for Snowden. This is partly explicable by Germany’s 20th century history. The East German Stasi had files on almost everyone in the country, and the Nazis used their security services and the Gestapo to terrorise the population.
But what appears to have angered Germans in the current scandal is the part played by the Americans and the British. It feeds into a German narrative of American occupation, about which there has been ambivalence since the end of the second world war. During the Cold War, West Germany needed American and British Nato forces on its soil to protect it against the Soviet Union. But this military presence was also evidence that the Germans did not have true sovereignty.
The left was particularly disturbed by American nuclear weapons in Germany, concerned that the country might be reduced to a battlefield between the two great superpowers, the US and Russia. In the early 1980s, walls all over West Germany were daubed with the slogan “Petting not Pershing”, a version of “Make love not war” referring to American Pershing II intermediate-range nuclear missiles, controlled by the Americans but based at three sites in West Germany.
Today, with the Cold War long over, graffiti on buildings in Berlin read “©Google”, a reference to Google Street View. Google Street View has been repeatedly challenged through the German courts for invasion of privacy. If you use Street View to look at German cities, you see a remarkable number of buildings blurred out. Their owners have gone through the time-consuming process of getting Google to agree to respect their privacy.
Matthew Tempest, a British journalist in Berlin, says that even before the NSA scandal Germans were prone to use anonymous profiles on Facebook, refuse to save their documents on Google docs and choose German webmail services rather than American ones. Whereas in Britain it is now possible to follow every twist and turn of national politics through Twitter, it is just not used in the same way by German journalists or politicians.
Since the NSA affair broke, the suspicion of large American internet and IT companies has increased. Tempest says that in left-wing kindergartens in Berlin, six-year-olds are learning about the bravery of Edward Snowden in defying the NSA.
With American dominance of the IT industry now widely seen by Germans as a form of cyber-occupation by a foreign power, it is no surprise that large German telecommunications companies have seen a commercial opportunity to exploit this distrust.
“The Germans don’t care about snooping as long as it isn’t the Americans who are doing it”
Niko Härting says: “I am convinced that anti-American feeling is behind the German reaction. I have heard the same people who are making the most outraged comments about NSA spying being quite mild about the activities of our own secret service.”
He says that Germans have seemed perfectly happy to have the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) read their emails. There was barely an outcry when a German parliamentary committee discovered that in 2010 the BND had read 37 million emails, identified through key words like “bomb”, without any judicial oversight of their activities.
“All they have to do is to walk into Angela Merkel’s office and ask for permission to search for certain key words,” says Härting. “And we don’t really know what they do.”
Härting is certain that at least some of the BND’s activities are illegal under the German constitution, but so far the agency has not been challenged. It is difficult for an individual to challenge it, he explains, because that individual would have to prove that he or she had been targeted – and people do not know if their own emails have been read.
The politicians, he says, could challenge it, but no political party has an interest in doing so.
“The Germans don’t care about snooping as long as it isn’t the Americans who are doing it,” he says.
That is why the idea of a German internet is attractive. It may well be unrealistic, but it addresses Germans’ fears that they are being occupied by a foreign power and gives them some sense that they are taking control over their own affairs.
Young Germans say nervously that the proposal is silly, that German companies do not have the technology and expertise to develop impenetrable IT systems, and that they will be forced to use American technology whether they like it or not.
The real problem, however, is that, scarred in the 20th century by the Stasi and the Nazi secret service, Germany is turning in on itself and refusing to have a public debate about why it feels so angry about American and British surveillance of its emails and data.
“There is no debate about this,” says Tilman Fichter. “Germany does not think it is strong enough to have the debate. People want to solve the problem in a technical way because they cannot solve it in political way. Germany feels economically strong, but not politically powerful.”