Stasi – praag.org

New biography shows Merkel close to communists

The pro-American publication Der Spiegel says a new biography on Angela Merkel’s life in East Germany shows she was closer to the communist apparatus and its ideology than previously thought.

Published this week and written by journalists Günther Lachmann and Ralf Georg Reuth, the book quotes Gunter Walther, a former colleague of hers at the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin, as saying she had been secretary for “Agitation and Propaganda” in the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ) youth organization at the institute. Merkel, a trained physicist, worked at the academy from 1978 until 1989.

Excerpts from the book, “The First Life of Angela M.,” were published in the newsmagazine Focus on Monday. The mass-circulation Bild newspaper has also given the book prominent coverage in recent days.

The book explores Merkel’s life growing up in German Democratic Republic (GDR), where her father Horst Kasner was a Protestant pastor and a committed socialist. He moved to East Germany from West Germany in 1954.

Merkel has said in the past that her FDJ role at the academy was more that of a cultural secretary and that her duties included buying theater tickets and organizing book readings.

But former German Transport Minister Günther Krause — an eastern German politician who worked with her in the final months of the GDR and as a fellow minister in the government ex-chancellor Helmut Kohl in the early 1990s — contradicts her in the book and says she propagated Marxism-Leninism.

“With Agitation and Propaganda you’re responsible for brainwashing in the sense of Marxism,” he said. “That was her task and that wasn’t cultural work. Agitation and Propaganda, that was the group that was meant to fill people’s brains with everything you were supposed to believe in the GDR, with all the ideological tricks. And what annoys me about this woman is simply the fact that she doesn’t admit to a closeness to the system in the GDR. From a scientific standpoint she wasn’t indispensable at the Academy of Sciences. But she was useful as a pastor’s daughter in terms of Marxism-Leninism. And she’s denying that. But it’s the truth.”

On Sunday evening, Merkel said she hadn’t covered up anything about her past. “I can only rely on my memory,” she said at a public screening of her favorite movie, a popular love film made in East Germany, on Sunday night. “If something turns out to be different, I can live with that.”

Her past may have contributed to making her inscrutable. Focus quotes Werner Schulz, a member of the European Parliament for the Greens who grew up in East Germany, as saying: “Her secrecy is a legacy of the GDR, I think. At the time you had to be careful about blurting out your opinions without thinking first. (…) Even today not many people know what she’s really thinking.”

According to journalist Stefan Berg, the book hasn’t really shed any new light on the first 35 years of Merkel’s life. Instead, he writes, it has thrown a fresh veil over it — a veil of supposed conspiracy. “A disproportionate amount of mistrust runs through this book,” writes Berg, who was born in East Berlin in 1964. “While Merkel’s own declarations are eagerly called into question, intelligence reports are taken at face value and Socialist phrases are taken more seriously than they were in GDR times.”

The book makes the “perfidious” suggestion that secret powers aided Merkel’s path into politics, that she is some kind of Soviet plant, writes Berg.

Source: Der Spiegel

The Americans lied

Last summer, German Chancellor Angela Merkel promised her citizens a pact which would prohibit U.S. spying on German citizens. But since then, Washington has shown little interest in pursuing such a treaty. Now, officials in Germany fear the deal is dead.

Failed talks? Hardly. The negotiations “are continuing,” says Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). “We are still talking,” says the German government. In other words, nothing has yet been decided. The No-Spy deal is still alive.

But the statements coming out of Berlin and Pullach, where the BND is headquartered, reek of forced optimism. Nobody wants it to look as though efforts have been abandoned toward a deal which would see the U.S. agree to swear off spying operations in Germany.

Yet despite the assertions, most of those involved are slowly coming to the realization that a surveillance deal between Washington and Berlin isn’t likely to become reality. The U.S. government is still digging in its heels.

On Tuesday, the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung quoted one source who is familiar with the talks as saying “we won’t get anything.” The paper also reported that the US is refusing to promise that it won’t monitor members of the German government and other politicians in the future.

No surprises here.

Source: Der Spiegel

Germany: US snooping poses risk of data theft, industrial espionage

German companies believe the US now poses almost as big a risk as China when it comes to industrial espionage and data theft, a survey has revealed.

The startling finding of a survey of 400 companies conducted in mid-July underscores the shift in German public and business opinion caused by revelations about US surveillance activities.

Some 26 per cent of German managers, IT and security professionals described the US as a high-risk place for industrial espionage and data theft, according to the survey commissioned by EY, the consultancy.

This was second only to the 28 per cent of respondents who view China as a particularly high-risk country for industrial espionage. Russia was ranked third, with 12 per cent saying it posed a significant risk.

When they were asked the same question two years ago only 6 per cent of German companies described the US as a high-risk centre for industrial espionage and data theft.

“Until now [German companies] mostly identified China and Russia as the location of [potential] attackers. Now companies realise that western intelligence agencies also employ very comprehensive surveillance measures,” Bodo Meseke, executive director of fraud investigation and dispute services at EY, said.

US surveillance has become a core issue in Germany’s election campaign following disclosures about Prism, the US data mining programme, and reports in Der Spiegel, the German magazine, that the US has spied on EU offices and is obtaining around 500m pieces of metadata a month from Germany.

Opposition parties have pressed ministers to obtain answers from the US on the extent of any spying on German soil, and the Federation of German Industry has described media reports about US surveillance as “concerning”.

Following meetings in Washington last month, Hans-Peter Friedrich, Germany’s interior minister, assured German industry that the US National Security Agency had not engaged in industrial espionage in Germany.
The US says its cyber activities are focused on combating terrorism and do not target companies, in contrast to China, which Washington accuses of cyber snooping to obtain corporate secrets.

These assurances do not appear to have convinced a significant portion of Germany’s business community.

Germany’s dependence on high-tech exports means the protection of patents and intellectual property are of perennial concern. Modern Germany’s tolerance of mass surveillance is also far lower than in other countries because of their experience of Nazism and East Germany’s Stasi secret police.

German companies continue to view business competitors in foreign countries as a bigger espionage threat than state intelligence agencies, according to the EY survey.

There are signs that disclosures made by Edward Snowden, the former NSA official turned whistleblower, are affecting the cloud computing industry, which involves storage of data and software on huge external servers rather than local hard drives.

A separate survey carried out last month by the Cloud Security Alliance, a trade body, found that 10 per cent of non-US members had cancelled plans to use a US-based cloud provider. Some 56 per cent said they would be less likely to use a US cloud company in future. – FT

‘American-style Stasi methods’

Germans are expressing outrage as details of a US internet spy program – revealed by a former CIA employee-turned-whistleblower – are prompting comparisons with that of former communist East Germany’s Ministry for State Security.

Unfortunately for Obama’s upcoming trip to Berlin, it was revealed that Germany ranks as the most-spied-on EU country by the US, a map of secret surveillance activities by the National Security Agency (NSA) shows.

German ministers are expressing their outrage over America’s sweeping intelligence-gathering leviathan, with one parliamentarian comparing US spying methods to that of the communist East Germany’s much-dreaded Ministry for State Security (Stasi).

Washington is using “American-style Stasi methods,” said Markus Ferber, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Bavarian sister party and member of the European Parliament.

“I thought this era had ended when the DDR fell,” he said, using the German acronym for the disposed German Democratic Republic.

Clearly, enthusiasm for the American leader’s upcoming visit will be much more tempered than it was in 2008 when 200,000 people packed around the Victory Column in central Berlin to hear Obama speak of a world that would be dramatically different from that of his hawkish Republican predecessor, George W. Bush.

Merkel will question Obama about the NSA program when he visits in Berlin on June 18, government spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters on Monday. Some political analysts fear the issue will dampen a visit that was intended to commemorate US-German relations on the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech.

One year into his second term, Barack Obama seems powerless to roll back the military and security apparatus bolted down by the Bush administration in the ‘War on Terror.’

One consequence of this failure of the Obama administration to reign in Bush-era excesses emerged last week when former National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden, 29, blew the whistle on a top-secret intelligence system named Prism, which collects data on individuals directly from the servers of the largest US telecommunications companies.

According to documents leaked to the Washington Post and Guardian newspapers, PRISM gave US intelligence agencies access to emails, internet chats and photographs from companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Verizon and Skype.

Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said leaked reports that US intelligence services are able to track virtually all forms of Internet communication demanded an explanation.

“The more a society monitors, controls and observes its citizens, the less free it is,” she wrote in a guest editorial for Spiegel Online on Tuesday. “The suspicion of excessive surveillance of communication is so alarming that it cannot be ignored. For that reason, openness and clarification by the US administration itself is paramount at this point.”

She has sent a letter to her “US counterpart Eric Holder” seeking clarification on the legal foundation of the PRISM program.

“I’ve observed with great concern reports about a possible program,” Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said in a statement emailed by her ministry in Berlin. “This may constitute massive access to telecommunications data without permission on a huge scale.”

All of the facts must be put on the table, the minister added.

Obama has defended the intelligence-gathering system as a “modest encroachment” that Americans should be willing to accept on behalf of security.

“You can’t have 100 per cent security and also then have 100 per cent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he said. “We’re going to have to make some choices as a society. There are trade-offs involved.”

The United States, however, is not legally restricted from eavesdropping on the communications of foreigners, meaning in theory that Washington could be listening to and collecting the private communications of individuals anywhere in the world.

Peter Schaar, Germany’s federal data protection commissioner, said the leaked intelligence was grounds for “massive concern” in Europe.

“The problem is that we Europeans are not protected from what appears to be a very comprehensive surveillance program,” he told the Handelsblatt newspaper. “Neither European nor German rules apply here, and American laws only protect Americans.”

Meanwhile, German opposition parties hope to gain from the scandal, especially with parliamentary elections approaching in September, and Merkel looking to win a third term.

“This looks to me like it could become one of the biggest data privacy scandals ever,” Greens leader Renate Kuenast told Reuters.

Obama is scheduled to hold talks and a news conference with Merkel on Wednesday followed by a speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate, the 18th triumphal arch that is one of Germany’s most recognizable landmarks. – RT