[pepr]

The point here isn't that ANY government can't listen on. That's a noble goal but so not achievable in a short period of time for everyone. The goal here is that German citizen isn't spied on by the US government because the US government has shown utter lack of respect to rights of anyone who isn't a US citizen. The point here is that if your own democratic government is spying on you, you have some (albeit limited) degree of control (elections) and rights (because you're voter, so they care about you). When a foreign government spies on you, you have almost zero control.

[GauntletWizard]

And Germany has, currently and historically, shown an utter contempt for the rights of it's citizens, far moreso than the current US crisis. Germany talks a good game with their data privacy laws, but those only affect citizens data being collected by corporations; They've dramatically increased their data collection laws[1], and while some have been found unconstitutional (Look up the Telecommunications Databank opinion), they've quickly been reworded and re-enacted[2].

Because of German data seizure laws, they believe they can request any data about or belonging to any German citizen without a warrant, so long as that data resides in Germany. At least one large cloud provider has German datacenters, but will not use them for storage of any German citizens data because of this.

[1]: http://idpl.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/09/10/idpl...

[2]: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/04/11/germ-a11.html

[derefr]

So... what's a country that doesn't have much of a history of contempt for the rights of its citizens?

[lazyjones]

> The goal here is that German citizen isn't spied on by the US government because

... and what they actually achieve is that german citizens are spied on by the BND, which forwards everything to the NSA.

And no, you have no democratic control over this in Germany because the german government is a corrupt bunch of liars too. At every Snowden leak regarding the BND/NSA cooperation, they changed their fairy tales a little bit.

[sentenza]

Indeed. But it is important to note that any data collected by German intelligence agencies will be made available to other intelligence agencies, including the US ones, due to cooperation agreements in place. Unfortunately, some of these cooperation agreements are inherited from the immediate postwar history and it remains unclear whether they even can be modified or revoked.

[junto]

I can almost stomach that over absolute mass analysis and storage in Utah of everything I say, email or browse, when I'm not a US citizen.