My understanding is that the privacy restrictions are largely the result of half the country having lived under the Statsi, and thus being extremely weary of government eyes. Here it’s out in the open!
Because they're not necessarily contradictory. This doesn't just give secret services a blank cheque to spy on everyone, it just provides intelligence agencies with a tool.
I'm German and I don't object in principle to the fact that intelligence, under supervision of the government, has the ability to say, infiltrate criminal networks using software like this. Under certain circumstances the police was always able to wiretap a phone, I don't see the difference here other than this taking into account the changing circumstances of internet communication.
Also from a cultural standpoint if anything people in Germany are more sceptic of erosion of privacy by private power than by the state, we're not the US. The former is pretty much unconstrained, the latter is so tightly limited in scope by law it's not really a practical issue. The scary thing about the Stasi wasn't that they were inteliigence, every country has intelligence officers who can bug someone's home, it was that the GDR was an autocratic regime.
I think the idea that communication ought to be categorically out of reach of intelligence is very novel. I don't think it was even conceivable decades ago that, with legal justification, intelligence could not hack or be completely locked out of the communication of some network. For criminals who are savy enough, tech has made it much harder, not easier for the government to do their job.
I think there is also a very paradoxical side-effect. A harmstrung government may resort to outsourcing its intelligence work. I read a story about private firms in the US collecting license plate information and selling it back to the police. Clearview AI is certainly another example. If the agencies are limited, there is a real chance of both ineffective policing and a huge unregulated surveillance grey market. I would rather equip the government with enough capacity, but strong legal checks.
Other countries were somehow aware of that weakness of telegrams, and the practice of attempting to use some code for telegram messages existed even then.
It's a trope that "sounds good" but IMHO doesn't get one more knowledge.
a) It was de facto an empire, but with an emperor allowing huge independence to the local rulers. So he was an emperor, even if he couldn't do "anything anytime".
"The power of the emperor was limited, and while the various princes, lords, bishops, and cities of the empire were vassals who owed the emperor their allegiance, they also possessed an extent of privileges that gave them de facto independence within their territories. " (1)
b) It was "holy" in the sense of "Christian" and in the sense of getting weaker due to the "holy wars" raging even between the parts of the empire.
c) the "roman" could be the most disputed, but it reflects the millenniums-long belief of what the "real" empire is supposed to be, namely, the one that is the successor of the rulers by which we name two months in a year even today.
The trope's origin is Voltaire. His influence on the beliefs of the western world must be acknowledged, but it must be recognized that he wrote a lot with the intention of changing them (and some changes were even bigger than he accepted).
As I write this I still haven't read https://doi.org/10.7245/0026-2005-42.1.60 but I'd expect that it worth a read for those interested in more details:
"For the historian, Voltaire's famous quip has three aspects: 1) What did Voltaire mean by it in 1756 when he wrote the line in his Essay on Customs? 2) How did contemporaries, including the Austrian Habsburgs, understand it? 3) Does the quote accurately describe the events the Philosophe is discussing (Charles IV of Bohemia and the Golden Bull of 1356)? Voltaire in fact exaggerates the weakness of the Empire in both 1356 and 1756, and uses an anachronistic standard to evaluate both: the quasi nation states of the 1750s. The three parts of the imperial title had changed in meaning during the four centuries after 1356. The jibe nonetheless reflects something of the thought of Voltaire and the French Enlightenment."
I totally get the appeal of that argument, but it completely breaks down once I ask myself how much that autocratic bogeyman regime, once it got into power, would feel bound by privacy protections put in place by their predecessors.
It's also really hard to establish or continue without the surveillance to detect rebellion and corruption.
They have strict privacy laws? First Nazi personel in the first half then Stasi personel in the second half of the 20th century were simply requalified and rehired, each bloody time. How do you think?
They are top environmentally-friendly country? Highest polluting coal power plants in EU are located in Germany.
Obviously, the OP was talking about the perception of Germany today and I think we can safely assume that no Ex-Nazi personnel is currently working at the German secret service. And coming to think of it, why wouldn't someone whose qualified to spy on others be rehired to do the same job in Germany after the end of GDR? What do you think secret services do?
Regarding "environmentally friendly", this point is correct but you're omitting that Germany just recently passed a law to get out of coal until 2038. The energy produced in Germany will then be pretty much exclusively renewable which is not a small feat for a country with such a large population.
Sorry but you are rude.
> I think we can safely assume that no Ex-Nazi personnel is currently working at the German secret service
Stasi personel though?
Are you expecting that people using such nuanced and subtle techniques like Zersetzung against domestic population [1] will suddently become ethical towards anyone they perceive as threat? or as undesirable?
On the facade Germans get some show off initiatives (no Street View!), behind the scenes is business as usual.
Yes, you are right. I apologize, I clearly went overboard.
> Stasi personel though? [...]
I think it's just an over-generalization. Just because you worked for the Stasi automatically makes you a bad fit for a certain job. It really depends.
I am sorry, I am from Russia initially, the KGB-land. No, it's not an over-generalization.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3j90ua/what_...
This predates the wall, but the wall only confirmed what was going on beforehand.
If viewed from the different perspective of government intrusion on tech, it can appear less shocking. A government encouraged by its citizenry to use its leverage over tech companies will continue to do so, and not always in the same ways.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53237685
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_X_plot
Someone said that's a result of constant under-funding and treating your military with no respect - when it's only seen as a choice for those who can't "do any better", you'll get extremists among the ranks.
Sounds plausible, at least in the US soldiers seem to be highly respected and in turn, they respect the country and its people.