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German Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman has said she will raise the issue with Obama in talks next Wednesday, potentially casting a cloud over a visit that was designed to celebrate U.S.-German ties on the 50th anniversary John F. Kennedy's famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech.
Government surveillance is an extremely sensitive topic in Germany, where memories of the dreaded Stasi secret police and its extensive network of informants are still fresh in the minds of many citizens.
In a guest editorial for Spiegel Online on Tuesday, Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said reports that the United States could access and track virtually all forms of Internet communication were "deeply disconcerting" and potentially dangerous.
"The more a society monitors, controls and observes its citizens, the less free it is," she said.
"The suspicion of excessive surveillance of communication is so alarming that it cannot be ignored. For that reason, openness and clarification by the U.S. administration itself is paramount at this point. All facts must be put on the table."
First, the was no internet when the east German secret police were in operation. Second either the Germans are idiots or they are lying because the NSA has always had not on the capability to ease drop on foreign electronic signals, but has done so for decades.
Germany has reason to question the spying of it citizens since they have history of doing it to themselves.
Even more so since another country is doing it.
Germany has reason to question the spying of it citizens since they have history of doing it to themselves.
Even more so since another country is doing it.
Yes, and there was a time america would be doing the lecturing on freedom and respect of civil liberties.
Yes! Let's take advice from the Germans! They didn't spy on their Jewish citizens! They just murdered them instead!
We don't heed our own advice. We rounded up Japanese Americans and put them in camps and then discriminated them for years after the war was over and we released them.
And we used the confidential census data to hunt them down and round them up.
We're no Pollyanna ourselves.
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