Payback can sure be a bitch.
Posted on 07/01/2013 12:12:19 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
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 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 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
No more so than us. I couldn't find anyone who would admit to voting for Nixon after his fall. This was in Orange County, CA and included people who formerly bragged about voting for him.
Payback can sure be a bitch.
I guess this author never heard of STASI.
Germans have a history of falling hard for guys who put on big rallies, shout and stomp their feet, have party emblems, and make big promises, but they have also learned that those kind of things don't always work out well.
Say what you want but the man knows how to chow down on a hamburger in a drunken stupor on the floor...
Excuse me if I don’t place a lot of stock in what those people say. Seems their record of identifying people who side with the devil is spotty at best. Or maybe they CAN spot evil! They are 2 for 2 with Hitler and Obama.
And I am half German by ancestry but 100% American by birth. No hyphens for me! I leave that to the lessor-americans.
They love him. I have friends there who think he's the bees knees. There was no talking them out of it, closed minds and the lib msm is all they want to know. I haven't spoken to them since.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.