The scandals about Prism and Tempora have Germans, and most Europeans, up in arms. They are railing about the fact that their privacy is being stomped on.
What they don't know however, is that the BKA and other German investigative agencies have used the NSA program to exchange information for criminal investigation for some time now, and the program does provide several countries with mutual assistance in both secret and not so secret investigations.
Amidst the furor and the angst at the surveillance programs, went almost unobserved a crime investigation that used the very same wide-sweeping intelligence collection method to catch a feared mass shooter, who had been targeting citizens randomly for years.
Although German politicians of every stripe are posturing and huffing in defense of their constistuents' right to privacy, in secret they well know how much of the program they are sharing and for what reasons, and they are not about to close the information spigot.
Enter the mass shooter. This individual had terrorized German's autobahns for years, shooting randomly at unsuspecting drivers. The way this man was caught was through a sophisticated surveillance system which was able ultimately to read the license plates of millions of cars on the highways.
Be as it may that this surveillance did not avail itself of foreign data banks like the one the NSA is compiling, it still represents the kind of mass data collection the NSA employs to vacuum up information it then stores for later use. Everyone's data, as in tag number and vehicle was identified and kept, together with the time they were on the road, etc, was collected and stored.
The mass shooter has fired more than 762 shots at cars and trucks since he began his criminal spree. He has not killed anyone, but he has maimed a woman and almost caused a fatal accident when a surprised driver swerved in panic.
The man is a 57 year old from Nordrein Westphalia. His name has not yet been released. After being apprehended, he confessed that his spree was motivated by the jarring traffic jams he was forced to endure as a truck driver. He likened the grind of Germany's roads as some sort of vehicular war, against which he was merely defending himself.
What made the data collection illegal? Although autobahns collect information on the drivers, it is illegal for the police to look at it. That is why the police decided to install its own, not-so-legal, surveillance mechanism. The top data protection official in Westphalia however said that "there is not a sufficient legal basis for such a nationwide.....investigative technique."
For many East Germans, this type of transgressions touch a raw nerve. Between the Stasi's past and the Nazi's equally brutal surveillance, most Germans are not willing to give any one agency or police outfit such overreaching powers. But they are glad the shooter was caught.
Source: Spiegel online/ 6.28.13
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