That means dependency.
In this case, being dependent on China.
Germany planning to ban Huawei, ZTE from parts of 5G networks.
There is no evidence that China is spying with the help of the telecom equipment suppliers’ technology. Nevertheless, they are to be banned from the 5-G network – for fear of dependencies.
No, that’s not from a Philip K. Dick novel.
It’s bitter reality. In German minds, anyway.
Tesla cars have been banned by police in the German capital Berlin over spying fears sparked by the vehicles’ high-tech cameras.
The ban comes just a day after China banned all Teslas from a resort town where the country’s secretive leadership group is holding a conference.
They can’t hardly spy on Germans anymore, at home and abroad. With foreigners here it’s not much better. And now…
German intelligence can’t spy on foreigners outside Germany – Germany’s Constitutional Court ruled on Tuesday that monitoring the internet traffic of foreign nationals abroad by the BND intelligence agency partly breaches the constitution.
Sheesh. A lot of German spies are going to need therapy. And worst of all, it doesn’t really matter whether Germans do any spying or not, and they know it. Whenever anything real goes down the tip-offs always come from a “befreundeten Nachrichtendienst” (allied intelligence service) anyway. They never say who this service is because everybody already knows and they’d rather not talk about it.
“A secret service that wants to protect democracy cannot trample on important democratic freedoms.”
Buried in the woods somewhere in West Germany thirty years ago.
Sophisticated Soviet spy radio discovered buried in former forest in Germany – Archaeologists digging for the remains of a Roman villa near the German city of Cologne have found a sophisticated Soviet spy radio that was buried there shortly before the fall of the Iron Curtain.
The spy radio was buried inside a large metal box that was hermetically sealed with a rubber ring and metal screws. Although the radio’s batteries had run down after almost 30 years in the ground, the box hissed with inrushing air when it was opened…
The scientists suspect agents would have used the spy radio to send secret reports back to the Soviet Union about observation of the Jülich Nuclear Research Centre, about 6 miles (10 km) west of where it was found; or of the military air base at Nörvenich, about the same distance to the southeast, where U.S. Pershing nuclear missiles were based until 1995.
Damn. Somebody needs to inform Angela Merkel immediately.
Germany doesn’t have many friends at all, I guess, because they’ve spied on just about everybody out there.
Report: US, Germany spied on countries for decades via Swiss encryption firm – Western intelligence acquired top secret information on global governments through their hidden control of an encryption firm, Crypto AG, according to media reports. Swiss authorities are investigating the allegations.
“The events under discussion started around 1945, and it is difficult to reconstruct them.”
Right? Not in Germany there isn’t.
To understand any German position on any international theme or issue you must understand that US-Amerika is somehow, in some way, in some form, a, if not the, negative factor in it. Once you understand and accept this, everything German politicians and diplomats say starts making sense. Take China and 5G for instance. Please.
The US ambassador to Berlin has sharply criticised German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier for suggesting a parallel between Chinese and US spying.
The row flared up over Germany’s decision not to ban Chinese tech giant Huawei from participation in the German 5G mobile phone network…
Meanwhile, a new opinion poll suggests a wide gap between the views of Americans and Germans on US-German relations.
Three-quarters of Americans surveyed were positive. But nearly two-thirds of Germans felt relations were bad, the Pew Research Center/Körber-Stiftung poll found.
“There is no moral equivalency between China and the United States and anyone suggesting it ignores history.”
Go ask Angela Merkel, she’ll tell you.
Certain countries are above all that. Being located on the moral high ground like they are, you know.
Vienna has demanded an explanation from Berlin over reports that Germany’s BND agency spied on nearly 2,000 targets in Austria between 1999 and 2006. Austrian media said embassies were among the targets.
Top Austrian officials have called on Germany to clarify reports that its BND spy agency snooped on high-profile targets including embassies, international organizations, Austrian ministers and banks based in the Austrian capital…
Following revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013, German Chancellor Angela Merkel slammed the US for its extensive spying on targets in Germany. “Spying among friends is not at all acceptable,” she famously said in the wake of the scandal.
Here in Germany, I mean. It is outrageous, unacceptable behavior and is damaging press freedom in Germany and abroad.
Like I said, outrageous. So where’s the outrage, folks?
Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, apparently spied on large numbers of foreign journalists overseas over the course of several years, including employees of the BBC, Reuters and the New York Times. Critics see a massive violation of press freedoms.
Don’t EVER let anybody tell you that Germans are lasch (feeble) when it comes to threats posed to them by foreign intelligence snoops.
Forget about not caring about Putin & Co., forget about spinning your wheels ridiculously with your NSA spying affair. We’ve got a real live (sort of) freakin’ wi-fi-connected Internet doll on the loose and we’re all going to die if we don’t kill her first. OK. So we don’t know who she’s working for yet. But still.
A German government watchdog has ordered parents to destroy an internet-connected doll for fear it could be used as a surveillance device. According to a report from BBC News, the German Federal Network Agency said the doll (which contains a microphone and speaker) was equivalent to a “concealed transmitting device” and therefore prohibited under German telecom law…
“My Friend Cayla” uses a microphone to listen to questions, sending this audio over Wi-Fi to a third-party company (Nuance) that converts it to text. This is then used to search the internet, allowing the doll to answer basic questions, like “What’s a baby kangaroo called?”
Why would anybody want to know what a baby kangaroo is called, huh?
And this is just the beginning, too. These wi-fi-thingies will soon be everywhere. “It doesn’t matter what that object is — it could be an ashtray or a fire alarm.” Damn right. So after you’ve finished strangling this doll toss everything else out of the window while you’re at it. Just in case. They’re out to get us, people. They’re everywhere, I tell you. Whoever they are. Bad dolly!
At what point did we enter this Philip K. Dick novel, anyway?
But only because they appear to have Laurel and Hardy doing it.
An attempt to wiretap John Kerry’s personal cellphone number back in 2013 failed, for instance, because the agent trying to do the listening in mixed up the US country code with one from Africa.
The Germans apparently had better luck spying on the former foreign policy chief of the European Union, Catherine Ashton back in 2008, however, although I have to assume that they misdialed this number, too. Maybe they were tying to listen in on that Jose Manuel Barroso guy instead?
Laut „Spiegel“ hatte der BND auch die Handynummer von US-Außenminister John Kerry 2013 in die Erfassung aufgenommen. Dabei habe es aber wegen einer Panne keine Abhörergebnisse gegeben: Ein BND-Mitarbeiter habe angeblich statt der Ländervorwahl der USA versehentlich die eines afrikanischen Landes eingegeben.
Observing Hermann 