Germany is a great place for self-fulfilling assertions. Something is true because it is repeatedly claimed to be true – until it’s shown to be untrue.
Take the crash of Germanwings flight 9525. The wreck was still smoking in the French Alps when Lufthansa bosses insisted at a press conference that their airline and its low-cost subsidary had the highest aviation safety standards in Europe.
That claim evaporated when it emerged that the crash was caused by a co-pilot who locked himself, alone, into the cockpit when the captain went to the toilet. Unlike many other European airlines, including in Ireland, Lufthansa and Germanwings did not oblige two staff members to occupy the cockpit at all times.
Germany asserts it has the highest data protection standards in Europe and condemns countries like Ireland it perceives as having looser standards. That sits uncomfortably with ongoing talks in Brussels on new EU data protection rules, where Berlin has lobbied hard for its direct marketing and banking industry, even if this means diluting others’ higher data collection standards in these sectors to Germany’s own, weaker, level.
When the Edward Snowden allegations broke in 2013 Chancellor Angela Merkel, said she was shocked, shocked, that the NSA was spying on European companies, EU institutions, and even on her own mobile phone.
Spying on friends, she said gravely, is just not on. But what if spying on friends is most certainly on? What if that’s what friends are for?
Those are the questions hanging over this week’s claims in Berlin that considerable NSA mass surveillance in Europe was enabled by Germany’s own foreign intelligence service. The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) allegedly processed thousands of automated NSA requests to spy on German arms manufacturers, the EADS aerospace consortium and even French government officials.
Soon after the co-operation began in 2002, months after the September 11 attacks, BND officials noticed some NSA requests involved sources not covered by their agreement. The BND says it filtered out these search requests but didn’t tell the NSA.
The political scandal gripping Berlin is whether or not the agency reported the matter to the chancellery. BND officials insist the chancellery was always in the picture but chose not to act. Dr Merkel’s office insists it first heard about the affair in March and demanded the BND remedy without delay “technical and organisational deficits” – without explaining what these deficits were.
A Bundestag committee established last year to look into NSA surveillance is now sorting through recent testimony from the government. Like the chancellery claim that the BND-NSA co-operation represented a “know-how gain” for the German spies involving “no activity against German interests”. Or the interior ministry’s response recently to a query from the Left Party, denying it had any knowledge of NSA economic espionage.
That would be an odd claim if, as the BND says, it told the chancellery of NSA interest in European companies as recently as March.
Interior minister Thomas de Maiziere, a former chancellery chief-of-staff, has denied the BND-NSA co-operation was illegal and said the NSA had a legitimate interest in European companies it suspected of trying to subvert trading sanctions.
Long-term Berlin watchers suggest that this scandal could yet blow over for two reasons. First: too many figures in both Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Social Democratic Party (SPD) coalition partners are involved for this to grow legs.
Recent oversight of the BND is the responsibility of CDU officials, but its co-operation with the NSA dates back to the Schröder era when it was overseen by chancellery head Frank Walter Steinmeier, now the SPD foreign minister.
Second: Angela Merkel soon realised after the original Snowden claims that, despite a supposed historical allergy to state snooping, the German elite’s outrage over the NSA is not shared by the wider public.
All the same, Berlin’s scandal-starved opposition senses blood in the water. It has started a who-knew-what-when campaign in the hope of denting Merkel’s credibility on one of two fronts: either force her to admit she didn’t know what her intelligence agency was up to with the NSA, or make her concede she did know and reveal her Snowden-NSA reaction as a holier-than-thou pantomime.
But for Germany’s neighbours, the real scandal lies beyond the domestic debate, namely in claims the BND aided NSA eavesdropping on EU institutions and officials in France. Now is the time for Paris to remind its neighbour, the land of the self-fulfilling assertion, of Angela Merkel’s 2013 claim: spying on friends is just not on.