Germany says Cold War tactics don't help EU-US trade talks | Hacker News Reader

Germany says Cold War tactics don't help EU-US trade talks

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208 pointsNonEUCitizen54 comments

I'm not sure the protection of the German state is something the US will care about:

Khalid El-Masri (born June 29, 1963) is a German citizen who was mistakenly abducted by the Macedonian Police, and handed-over to the U.S. CIA, whose officers interrogated, sodomized and tortured him. While in CIA hands, he was flown to Afghanistan, where he was held in a black site, interrogated, beaten, strip-searched and subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, tantamount to torture. After El-Masri held hunger strikes, and was detained for four months in the "Salt Pit", the CIA finally admitted his arrest and torture were a mistake and released him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaled_al-Masri

snowden is a white american. americans don't (in general - see reactions here to nsa) care about foreigners (especially coloured ones - guantanamo), but they get upset if a white american is hurt. so this won't happen with him.

Remember Bradley Manning?

ah, true.

he's gay? maybe that makes him an honorary black? i don't fully understand. any americans here can help me? is there anyone you stick up for? or is it just a big game of last under the bus wins?

rich white people

Realize that you are here hating on all Americans, because supposedly they all hate on every minority group.

If you're going to troll, put more effort into it. You just come off as a jerk here.

At least in America we know how to properly capitalize the language.

It's not so much about race... But this issue goes to show how slippery the slope is once you make exemptions to human rights...

maybe this is getting a bit off-topic, but i did live in the usa for a while - my partner had a sabbatical at yale. and pretty much everything in new haven seemed to come down to race. where you lived. what you drove. which shops you used. race was by far the best indicator i found for almost anything i cared to think of.

i guess maybe connecticut is particularly racist and as you go further south things are more balanced - i wouldn't know.

but it's not just me, is it? if we're talking about justice then america's legal system is famous for how it discriminates against coloured people. that and its size are what its known for, internationally. it's pretty much designed to kill blacks, right?

so to say that it's "not much about race" seems pretty weird. that seemed to be the defining characteristic of american culture - and particularly its legal system - to me.

i'm sorry if this comes across as america-bashing. but recently i've been told here so many times that my rights don't matter because i'm not american. so it's got the point where, well, we're just being realists, right? compassion, mutual respect, that kind of thing aren't what life is about...

I posted this here a while back[0], and it speaks to what you are saying… Even I have been treated better by complete strangers in Northern Africa than I do in the US…

We can play all the PC games, but the undertones are pervasive as it always has been here…

In the words of Langston Hughes: "America never was America to me"

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5694314

i guess maybe connecticut is particularly racist and as you go further south things are more balanced - i wouldn't know.

Generally, the stereotype is that the North is less racist and the South is more. Because of the War between the States (1861-1865) - Southern states were slave states and Northern states were free states.

It's more nuanced than that, but that's the main narrative.

Don't you think that you can substitute 'race' in your description of CT with 'money'? Ie - rich people live/drive and shop in different shops from poor people.

Technically they can do it but the political implications would be much different. Snowden is not a no-name citizen, abducting him would create an international diplomatic incident.

Yes. Exactly. This is the least we can do in the Europe. There are at least 3 reasons to do so:

1. This way we can signal we mean it with the democracy thing. 2. We can prevent random despot to claim moral superiority to EU because of granting the asylum. 3. EU is relatively safe from US revenge, unlike smaller countries.

The fact that Germany was spied on massively and it didn't seem that they were all that aware of it and the fact that the US has well established channels from the cold war there would mean that I wouldn't exactly feel safe if that was my safe haven.

Would be interesting to create a "how safe are you from foreign nations' assassination/capturing etc. here" index.

For the pairing Germany-USA I'd say not very safe.

The CIA can get you anywhere, as can Mossad or pretty much any other agency. Heck, even Libya managed attacks in western countries. It's just that diplomatic repercussions or outright war are usually enough of a deterrent.

In this particular case, the US can't do anything about it. Obama said he won't use fighter jets to get Snowden. If he fails on even that concrete specific and understandable promise, then he can kiss a good deal of American influence in the world goodbye.

Obama said he won't use fighter jets to get Snowden

Meet Suspiciously Specific Denial: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/SuspiciouslySpecificDe... (alternatvely combined with Exact Words: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ExactWords)

French's Green party made the same request during the night (asking to grant him asylum in France)

http://www.lemonde.fr/technologies/article/2013/07/01/eelv-d...

Please, whenever you read something about German politicians these days, keep in mind that there's an election this fall...

Then why isn't Merkel demanding the same?

Because she is from a conservative party which is more or less "okay" with surveillance.

She is not saying the same because she wants to play conservative and differentiate herself from the Greens/Left Party and SPD.

More or less is inaccurate. They are pushing strong surveillance acts. In fact just today the "Bestandsdatenauskunft" was made law. The law means, “that police and intelligence services will in the future be allowed to obtain extremely personal information about mobile phone users, and do so with the press of a button and without having to face any major legal hurdles”.

Traditional "Merkelian" politics is basically...wait until stuff blows over and let others make a fool of themselves. Same policy that Kohl followed ("Aussitzen") :)

I think this has some potential of losing her the elections though. Mostly because it seems the Greens will gain most from all of this.

Because she is actually in power and would have to live with all the repercussions. Oppositional politicians don't have that problem and can talk all day long about what the people like to hear.

This is exactly why all of Obama's pre-election rhetoric about privacy is coming back to haunt him now. It's easy to sell "change" when you don't have to implement it.

It also helped that Obama's opponents didn't have a snow flake's chance in hell to convince the voters they would change these issues...

When they say "Germany's third largest party" it's important to know that they only hold about 11% of the seats of the German Parliament (Bundestag) right now and are unlikely to affect matters in this case.

That's definitly right, but the demand of the greens is all over the media here. I don't think, that Snowden will really get safe haven in Europe, but it's nice to see that a lot of Germans would approve it. The outrage reaches the mainstream.

For context, the first and second party got 34% and 23% of votes respectively.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_federal_election,_2009

True, but due to proportional representation, smaller parties play a much larger role in German politics than, say, the UK or the US. Just a shift of about three percent from the current coalition of CDU and FDP to the SPD and Greens in the upcoming election would end Merkel's reign. And the NSA story might be just the event that moves those three percent from the current coalition to the opposition.

Yes, if anything the Greens as the third largest party play a much bigger role in German politics than someone from an American or Commonwealth background would intuitively expect.

Most probably the minister of foreign affairs would be coming from the green party in such a case. Though that might change their rethoric a bit.

Also, from Der Spiegel:

http://www.microsofttranslator.com/bv.aspx?from=de&to=en&a=h...

I'm actually suprised Russia,Ecuador, and Iceland were the only viable candidates mentioned for Snowden.

Although not a certainty I would imagine Belgium, France, and Germany would be good candidates also.

That is because beyond rhetoric. EU countries are mere colonies of the US and EU politicians will not do anything if they do not get a nod from the US.

EU is not independent and is a mere satellite of the US. I feel sorry for feel good hipsters that currently feel superior to the US in terms of freedom and democracy.

"I feel sorry for feel good hipsters that currently feel superior to the US in terms of freedom and democracy."

hmm, not sure why you felt the need to add that part. Were you even responding to my question or just reading off an internal script :P

As far as freedom goes, I can only speak for Belgium, my country. I am certainly envious of the economic freedom you see in the US. We have slid a little too far to the left over here. We also don't have the same level of free speech as the US: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_revisionism_(negatio...)

That being said, I won't be jailed for smoking a joint or experimenting with psychedelics. Our government isn't secretive and elusive in the way yours is and I'm not terrified of ever landing in prison here.

This is a general add on as you noticed.

The part about EU politicians talking the talk, but not walking the walk is a response to your comment :D

> We also don't have the same level of free speech as the US

Don't take free speech at face value. While theoretically you do have free speech, we have a large amount of overly-broad crimes one can commit. If you do or say something that a person of power doesn't like, they can and will use a different law to get you for it. It then boils down to, one being willing to spend years of one's life and absurd amounts of money trying to fight this charge, or just dealing with the charge and hoping it doesn't end horribly.

I know right? First when the hipster artists moved into my neighborhood I was like, this is ok I guess. Rent went up, but then everything gentrified a little. Then came the artisanal hipster bread makers and hipster coffee shops which were kind of convenient, though a little pretentious I guess.

But when the feel good G7 hipsters showed up, I knew everything had changed. I mean they can't even figure out a simple Kyoto protocol, you know?

I'm about wondering about Switzerland being neutral would that be part of considerations when dealing with political prisoners?

And Switzerland is not part of the EU, I'm not sure if that's good or bad in this situation.

I think Switzerland's financial industry is too important to risk by getting involved in this.

Those in glass houses?

Possibly, neutrality would work both ways I suppose I never really thought of it that way.

"Trittin said that in response to the latest revelations, the EU should suspend exchanging banking and flight data with the United States."

I wasn't aware the US actually "exchanges" any passenger data with the EU. I thought it's just EU giving them the data. So he probably means "EU needs to stop giving data to US".

Usually, these deals are one-sided, in that they only serve US.

> Usually, these deals are one-sided, in that they only serve US.

Then why would the EU enter into them?

So that the US can do the "dirty work".

We give the data to the US and, of course, the US only uses the data to fight terrorism.

I think our politicians knew that the US was doing more with the data than they said. But since this kind of data usage is not really aceptable in large parts of the EU we simply gave the data to the US to get the job done.

Then the politicians could say "we are not using your data and the US is only using it to fight terrorism" but in fact there was much more going on and everybody knew that.

Not sure what you're implying here. The EU gives data to the US about Europeans flying to the US. Then the US does the EU's dirt work? And after this "dirty work" is processed does the US play the data back to the EU?

Yes. That is what I am saying. It is not only the data about europeans flying to the US. The US also knows almost every bank transaction made via SWIFT...

Same thing with the US and "enhanced interrogation". We can say: "oh, we just gave that prisoner to the Saudis and they promised they would treat him appropriately and really, really not torture him, Scout's honor... They did seem to get some information from him that we weren't able to get, though, not sure how. Maybe something was lost in translation..."

Do you have a source for your last two statements?

The idea that European intelligence agencies aren't interested in any data that the US could give them seems absurd.

It would be great, but in reality Snowden would not be safe in Germany. We still have tens of thousands US military personel (the US central commands for Europe and Africa are here) and lots of US intelligence agencies active here. The US were also using Germany to transfer their secret prisoners to the torture prisons in East Europe.

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/cia-folter-in-polen-im-wa...

>Seibert (Merkel's representative) brushed aside a suggestion by the opposition Greens that the EU should provide a safe haven for Snowden.

Merkel isn't on board yet.

i don't mind him putting tent in my garden too. would get bit cold when autumn hits though.

Not here in Berlin please, I don't want Reaper strikes here. Thanks.

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