Henning Wagenbreth By
MALTE SPITZ
Published: June 29, 2013
BERLIN — IN May 2010, I received a brown envelope. In it was a CD with
an encrypted file containing six months of my life. Six months of
metadata, stored by my cellphone provider, T-Mobile. This list of
metadata contained 35,830 records. That’s 35,830 times my phone company
knew if, where and when I was surfing the Web, calling or texting.
The truth is that phone companies have this data on every customer. I
got mine because, in 2009, I filed a suit against T-Mobile for the
release of all the data on me that had been gathered and stored. The
reason this information had been preserved for six months was because of
Germany’s implementation of a 2006 European Union directive.
All of this data had to be kept so that law enforcement agencies could
gain access to it. That meant that the metadata of 80 million Germans
was being stored, without any concrete suspicions and without cause.
This “preventive measure” was met with huge opposition in Germany.
Lawyers, journalists, doctors, unions and civil liberties activists
started to protest. In 2008, almost 35,000 people signed on to a
constitutional challenge to the law. In Berlin, tens of thousands of
people took to the streets to protest data retention. In the end, the
Constitutional Court ruled that the implementation of the European Union
directive was, in fact, unconstitutional.
In Germany, whenever the government begins to infringe on individual
freedom, society stands up. Given our history, we Germans are not
willing to trade in our liberty for potentially better security. Germans
have experienced firsthand what happens when the government knows too
much about someone. In the past 80 years, Germans have felt the betrayal
of neighbors who informed for the Gestapo and the fear that best
friends might be potential informants for the Stasi. Homes were tapped.
Millions were monitored.
Although these two dictatorships, Nazi and Communist, are gone and we
now live in a unified and stable democracy, we have not forgotten what
happens when secret police or intelligence agencies disregard privacy.
It is an integral part of our history and gives young and old alike a
critical perspective on state surveillance systems.
When Wolfgang Schäuble, the interior minister from 2005 to 2009, pushed
for the implementation of the data-retention law, Germans remembered the
Stasi’s blatant disregard for privacy, as portrayed in the 2006 film
“The Lives of Others.” They recalled their visits to the
Hohenschönhausen district of Berlin, the site of the former Stasi
detention center.
They were reminded of the stories of their grandparents, about the
fear-mongering agents in the Gestapo. This is why Mr. Schäuble’s
portrait was often tagged provocatively with the phrase “Stasi 2.0.”
Lots of young Germans have a commitment not only to fight against
fascism but also to stand up for their own individual freedom. Germans
of all ages want to live freely without having to worry about being
monitored by private companies or the government, especially in the
digital sphere.
That was my motivation for publishing the metadata I received from
T-Mobile. Together with Zeit Online, the online edition of the weekly
German newspaper Die Zeit, I published an infographic of six months of my life for all to see.
With these 35,830 pieces of data, you can follow my travels across
Germany, you can see when I went to sleep and woke up, a trail further
enriched with public information from my social networking sites: six
months of my life viewable for everybody to see what exactly is possible
with “just metadata.”
Three weeks ago, when the news broke about the National Security
Agency’s collection of metadata in the United States, I knew exactly
what it meant. My records revealed the movements of a single individual;
now imagine if you had access to millions of similar data sets. You
could easily draw maps, tracing communication and movement. You could
see which individuals, families or groups were communicating with one
another. You could identify any social group and determine its major
actors.
All of this is possible without knowing the specific content of a
conversation, just technical information — the sender and recipient, the
time and duration of the call and the geolocation data.
With Edward J. Snowden’s important revelations fresh in our minds, Germans were eager to hear President Obama’s
recent speech in Berlin. But the Barack Obama who spoke in front of the
Brandenburg Gate to a few thousand people on June 19 looked a lot
different from the one who spoke in front of the Siegessäule in July
2008 in front of more than 200,000 people, who had gathered in the heart
of Berlin to listen to Mr. Obama, then running for president. His
political agenda as a candidate was a breath of fresh air compared with
that of George W. Bush. Mr. Obama aimed to close the Guantánamo Bay
detention camp, end mass surveillance in the so-called war on terror and
defend individual freedom.
But the senator who promised to shut Guantánamo is now a second-term
president who is still fighting for its closure. And the events of the
past few weeks concerning the collection of metadata and private e-mail
and social-media content have made many Germans further question Mr.
Obama’s proclaimed commitment to the individual freedoms we hold dear.
DURING Mr. Obama’s presidency, no American political debate has received
as much attention in Germany as the N.S.A. Prism program. People are
beginning to second-guess the belief that digital communication stays
private. It changes both our perception of communication and our trust
in Mr. Obama.
Even as a Green Party politician, I wasn’t impressed with Mr. Obama’s
focus on fighting global warming. While his renewed enthusiasm is
appreciated, it served as a distraction from the criticism he is
currently facing for allowing invasive state surveillance. He cannot
simply change the subject.
His speech caused many Germans to question whether Americans actually
share our understanding of the right balance between liberty and
security. In the past, we celebrated the fact that both countries valued
this balance, and there was huge solidarity with America after 9/11.
But the policy decisions of the Bush administration after the attacks —
from waterboarding to Guantánamo — appalled Germans. We were shocked to
see this mutual understanding disappear. Now we are not sure where Mr.
Obama stands.
When courts and judges negotiate secretly, when direct data transfers
occur without limits, when huge data storage rather than targeted
pursuit of individuals becomes the norm, all sense of proportionality
and accountability is lost.
While our respective security services still need to collaborate on both
sides of the Atlantic to pursue and prevent organized crime and
terrorism, it must be done in a way that strengthens civil liberties and
does not reduce them. Although we would like to believe in the Mr.
Obama we once knew, the trust and credibility he enjoyed in Germany have
been undermined. The challenge we face is to once again find shared
values, so that trust between our countries is restored.
Perhaps instead of including a quote from James Madison in his speech,
arguing that “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of
continual warfare,” Mr. Obama should have been reminded of the quote
from another founding father, Benjamin Franklin, when he said, “They
that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety,
deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/opinion/sunday/germans-loved-obama-now-we-dont-trust-him.html?hp&_r=0
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