German President says whistleblowers like Snowden merit respect

"We Germans have had to experience the
abuse of state power with secret services
twice in our history."

President Joachim Gauck

Germany's President, who helped expose the workings of East Germany's dreaded Stasi secret police, said whistleblowers like U.S. fugitive Edward Snowden deserved respect for defending freedom.

Weighing in on a debate that could influence September's federal election, President Joachim Gauck struck a very different tone from that of Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has assured Washington that Berlin would not shelter Snowden.

Gauck, who has little power but great moral authority, said people who work for the state were entitled to act according to their conscience, as institutions sometimes depart from the law reports Reuters News.

"This will normally only be put right if information is made public. Whoever draws the public's attention to it and acts out of conscience deserves respect," he told Friday's Passauer Neue Presse newspaper.

After the fall of communism, Gauck, a dissident Lutheran pastor, headed a commission in charge of the Stasi's vast archive of files on people it had spied on, using them to root out former Stasi members and collaborators.

"The fear that our telephones or mails are recorded and stored by foreign intelligence services is a constraint on the feeling of freedom and then the danger grows that freedom itself is damaged," he said.

"We are a democratic state with the rule of law with basic rights. Freedom is one of these basic rights."

Referring to communism and Nazism, Gauck said Germany had painful experiences of living in a security state where no one was safe to speak out:

"We Germans have had to experience the abuse of state power with secret services twice in our history. And therefore we are sensitive (to this) and our American friends must accept that."

The NSA's New Spy Facilities are
7 Times Bigger Than the Pentagon.
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Move along.  Nothing to see here.
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The $1.2 billion surveillance data center in Utah that is 15 times the size of MetLife Stadium, home to the New York Giants and Jets.  In May, crews broke ground on a $792 million computing center at the agency’s headquarters near Baltimore that will complement the Utah site. Together the Utah center and Maryland’s 28-acre computer farm span 228 acres—more than seven times the size of the Pentagon.
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Four years ago, the stated purpose of the megaplex near Salt Lake City was to amass foreign intelligence and warnings about hackers. Officials described it as an extension of President George W. Bush’s 2008 Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, a largely classified, cross-agency program to protect U.S. computer networks against adversaries.
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Today, it is evident the data plantation will not be linked to any one program. Instead, the systems inside will warehouse counterterrorism information collected in aggregate, including millions of Americans’ phone logs for five years and certain foreigners’ online messages, NSA officials confirm.
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See more at:  Defense One.com

 

The Utah Data Mining Center.