Niels C. Sorrells: Germany has been eavesdropping on its own citizens for decades -- It hasn't helped catch terrorists
[Niels C. Sorrells spent a year researching German surveillance policy with a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He is currently based in Berlin as a correspondent for the Bureau of National Affairs and is writing a book comparing German and U.S. surveillance tactics.]
When it comes to keeping tabs on its own residents in the ongoing war on terror, there’s a lot the United States could learn from Germany. Interestingly, the lessons would not be from Nazi Germany, where average citizens were encouraged to report on their neighbors, or from East Germany, where hundreds of thousands of people provided damning evidence about their friends and families. Neither regime lived up to its popular reputation as an all-knowing spy state.
It’s modern Deutschland—where West German police created a vast system of wiretaps and surveillance databases in the 1970s—that can offer the United States crucial insights into domestic espionage. And unfortunately for believers in this approach, the lessons from Germany aren’t encouraging: Its extensive internal surveillance has seen little success in detecting terrorist plots or putting conspirators behind bars.
Germany’s aggressive history of domestic intelligence began in the 1970s in response to a terror threat from the Red Army Faction (RAF), a left-wing guerilla group devoted to overthrowing the government. As RAF attacks increased in the late 1970s, Horst Herold, head of the German federal police and a firm believer in data mining and electronic tools, poured his agency’s resources into gathering information on the group’s members. In the 1980s, when changes in immigration laws and lenient student visa policies expanded Germany’s sizeable immigrant community, the snooping increased considerably. As it became clear that members of radical Muslim groups were using these policies to take refuge in the country, German authorities realized they would need to keep tabs on people who stirred suspicion.
September 11 and revelations of a Hamburg cell’s involvement gave authorities added incentive to increase the surveillance. During the past decade, Germany has increased its use of wiretaps by 500 percent. In 2004 alone, more than 29,000 wiretaps were approved, seven times the number authorized by U.S. courts that same year. The bulk of these taps are focused on common criminals—money launderers, extortionists, and the like. But a small percentage is aimed at people who fit the profile of potential terrorists.
Yet German authorities cannot point to a single successful prosecution of a terror suspect identified from these blind wiretaps. The colossal volume of information produced from tens of thousands of these taps often obscures real threats, while dead ends are pursued. Authorities quite simply do not have the time to listen to and process it all. In the one case in which such surveillance was used to detect a terror plot (and has yet to lead to a conviction in court), the authorities—thanks to old-fashioned investigative methods—already knew the identities of the alleged plotters. It’s hardly a ringing endorsement for the kind of all-encompassing, warrantless surveillance that the United States government wants its citizens to accept....
Read entire article at Foreign Policy
When it comes to keeping tabs on its own residents in the ongoing war on terror, there’s a lot the United States could learn from Germany. Interestingly, the lessons would not be from Nazi Germany, where average citizens were encouraged to report on their neighbors, or from East Germany, where hundreds of thousands of people provided damning evidence about their friends and families. Neither regime lived up to its popular reputation as an all-knowing spy state.
It’s modern Deutschland—where West German police created a vast system of wiretaps and surveillance databases in the 1970s—that can offer the United States crucial insights into domestic espionage. And unfortunately for believers in this approach, the lessons from Germany aren’t encouraging: Its extensive internal surveillance has seen little success in detecting terrorist plots or putting conspirators behind bars.
Germany’s aggressive history of domestic intelligence began in the 1970s in response to a terror threat from the Red Army Faction (RAF), a left-wing guerilla group devoted to overthrowing the government. As RAF attacks increased in the late 1970s, Horst Herold, head of the German federal police and a firm believer in data mining and electronic tools, poured his agency’s resources into gathering information on the group’s members. In the 1980s, when changes in immigration laws and lenient student visa policies expanded Germany’s sizeable immigrant community, the snooping increased considerably. As it became clear that members of radical Muslim groups were using these policies to take refuge in the country, German authorities realized they would need to keep tabs on people who stirred suspicion.
September 11 and revelations of a Hamburg cell’s involvement gave authorities added incentive to increase the surveillance. During the past decade, Germany has increased its use of wiretaps by 500 percent. In 2004 alone, more than 29,000 wiretaps were approved, seven times the number authorized by U.S. courts that same year. The bulk of these taps are focused on common criminals—money launderers, extortionists, and the like. But a small percentage is aimed at people who fit the profile of potential terrorists.
Yet German authorities cannot point to a single successful prosecution of a terror suspect identified from these blind wiretaps. The colossal volume of information produced from tens of thousands of these taps often obscures real threats, while dead ends are pursued. Authorities quite simply do not have the time to listen to and process it all. In the one case in which such surveillance was used to detect a terror plot (and has yet to lead to a conviction in court), the authorities—thanks to old-fashioned investigative methods—already knew the identities of the alleged plotters. It’s hardly a ringing endorsement for the kind of all-encompassing, warrantless surveillance that the United States government wants its citizens to accept....