Spies Gone Wild - German edition

You may only have heard about the meandering German spy "scandal" when you read that Austria had filed a criminal complaint after German papers reported that the BND (German foreign intelligence agency) did some spying on Austria as part of the German cooperation with the American NSA.

The K-Landnews have been fairly quiet about the revelations, speculations, in-fighting and finger pointing that have been reported over months.

The reason?

There is not much to say unless you have a keen interest in the goings on of the intelligence world. Today, though, the current German interior secretary will testify in front of the parliamentary investigative committee whose work has been at the heart of many of the discoveries of the past year.

And we will give you a summary of what he will say before he takes the stand!

Cooperation between the US and the German intelligence services has a long tradition, and in a world facing as many threats as today it continues to be a pillar of security and stability. The German agencies operate within the law, and whenever problematic issues were brought up, both the executive branch and the parliamentary oversight body have investigated and addressed these issues. Regarding my time as the secretary responsible for intelligence oversight, I can have always been open and can categorically say that we have not overstepped legal boundaries.

This not not verbatim, of course, emphasis may be different, wording will certainly be legally watertight as behooves a JD, but all in all, that's what you will get.

There isn't really more to it because those who support their intelligence folks and those who want answers and ethics could just as well live on different planets.

The lines in the media are well delineated between the two camps, with only egregious temporary outliers on either side making waves. For example, when the news broke that the BND had spied on French politicians and EU institutions on behalf of the NSA for years, a commentator in the middle of the road conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine temporarily lost it and called it utterly unacceptable.
A day or two later, he penned a piece strongly supporting the German agency.

The posting title Spies Gone Wild - German edition is meant to sum up the the intelligence world in easy imagery:
Unless you are a teen, you have seen it before. The initially tantalizing glimpses take on a deja vu quality. The actors change but the scenery and the takes remain pretty much unchanged. Once the cameras are off, everybody returns to their less than exhilarating daily routine.

We end this post with a vintage example of The art of deception, cover letter [scan].

[Update end of day] Pat on the shoulder for our clear understanding of how German politics work. The Germans have an idiom for that: Tarnen, Täuschen, Verpissen.
[End of Update]