Obama to Germans: Ich bin nicht Big Brother

On Wednesday President Obama brought his damage control effort over the NSA domestic spying scandal to Germany. He spoke in Berlin at the historic Brandenburg Gate, the backdrop to historic speeches by presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Mr. Obama strained for a place in history by pointing out he was the first U.S. president to speak from the eastern side of the gate, though this option was unavailable to his more illustrious predecessors, due to the minor matter of the Berlin Wall.

Mr. Obama made several references to divided Germany, such as praising the heroes of 1953 who rose up against communist East German rule, and were crushed by Soviet troops. However, it was poor optics to draw overt attention to that aspect of the country’s past. Germans are experts at understanding the workings of the surveillance state, having suffered under two totalitarian dictatorships in the 20th century.

Chancellor Angela Merkel grew up in the communist east, and post-unification revelations of the extent of domestic spying by the Stasi (the secret police) shocked Germans on both sides of the divide. The communist-era spying network was dramatized in the 2006 Academy Award-winning film “The Lives of Others,” and contemporary leaks about NSA snooping resonate with Germany’s bad old days. Last week Markus Ferber, a German representative in the European Parliament, accused the administration of using “American-style Stasi methods.” But the techniques used by today’s intelligence services are the kind of capabilities the old East German secret police could only dream of.

At a joint news conference with Mrs. Merkel, Mr. Obama assured Germans that the NSA program “is not a situation in which we are rifling through the ordinary emails of German citizens or American citizens or French citizens or anybody else.” He told the assembled that “this is not a situation where we simply go into the Internet and start searching any way we want. This is a circumscribed system directed at us being able to protect our people and all of it is done under the oversight of the courts.” Well, true and not true. The Internet is pretty much open to the U.S. Intelligence Community outside of the United States. The scandal Mr. Obama is struggling with centers on the government trampling on the Constitutional rights of American citizens. However, foreigners have no such rights under U.S. law, and the Intelligence Community can intercept communications in Germany without warrants, without court oversight, and without limit.

Germans recently learned that they are a major U.S. intelligence target. According to leaked information on the NSA data mining tool “Boundless Informant,” the United States conducts more surveillance inside Germany than any other country in Europe, including Russia. The concentration of intercepts is so high it puts Germany in the same category as China, Iraq, Saudi Arabia – and the United States. “Our current [surveillance] programs are bound by the rule of law,” Mr. Obama said, “and they’re focused on threats to our security — not the communications of ordinary persons.” Nevertheless in March 2013 alone the NSA collected 97 billion pieces of intelligence from “ordinary persons” on global computer networks. For programs that are supposedly bound by law, the code name “Boundless Informant” does not inspire confidence. And Germans know far better than Mr. Obama the slippery slope of sacrificing freedom for security. They tried it, and as Benjamin Franklin cautioned, they wound up with neither.

James S. Robbins is Deputy Editor of Rare and author of Native Americans: Patriotism, Exceptionalism, and the New American Identity. Follow him on Twitter @James_Robbins

See also on Rare: PHOTO: Angela Merkel is not impressed with President Obama