What's more, the US and Germany have Cold War era agreements that basically allow the US to do whatever they damn well please.

Sure, they cancelled the one was made public (http://bigstory.ap.org/article/germany-nixes-surveillance-pa...) but considering Germany was founded under US/British occupation, I would be surprised if there weren't less public agreements that state more or less the same. After all, the German government was paranoid about the Soviets at the time, so they were happy to have the US handle everything.