[Skybird]

If declared "freinds" are the worst of all enemies, then I think yes, that is a bit surprising. Mind you, already last year the assessments over here had been changed that not Russia or China is our worst opponent doing us the greatest economic damage, but America. Mind you also its not just this apparent American coup of placing a mole in the BND and compromising over one half of the BND's network of agents, it is the immense sniffing and breaching of privacy by the NSA and GCHQ that Snowden has revealed as well. Their technological means also get used for economic spionage, since business is in bed with politics in Germany - and Britian and the US alike, in the latter more than anywhere else in the West. People over here take governments sniffing in their privacy extremely queer (although they do not realise that much that that sniffing job they even invite by using all those antisocial media networks and telling the word about themselves carelessly and frankly, too).

Additionally we are being spied on by our own state and especially the finance ministry, to which we are totally transparent now.

I hate to say it, but in principle we live in a total surveillance state, in parts already even in a polcie state. What is running now, by scale and reach has been the wet dream of the Eastgerman StaSi.

The economcial damage America does to Germany by the mere amount of business espionage, is immense, and it does not compare to what the German services are able to do in reverse. Germany is at the tremendously losing end of this game.

One would have expected that from China. From Russia. From others. But from our so-called closest allies and friends?

Like during the Snowden debate I also must criticise the Germans, however. Too long they acted as stupid idiots, indeed believing pathetic speeches and empty ohrasesd about fiendship and alliances, and trtusted in that. As a result the German economy is still extremely vulnerable to cyberwarfare and computer espionage, because it did not invest in hardening its computer infrastructure. It has started to do so since snowden'S revelationsa, but it lags behind by years. Politically, the German government simply never has cared for America spying on Germany'S public and private citizens, and by that it has violated a central demand of the German constitution that is also part in every minister's oath being sworn before parliament.

The Germans voluntarily had chosen to stay weak, and not to built the defence structures needed. While now they claim to do some more, most of that is abused for giving the state better surveillance of its own population, and making it more vulnerable to state intervention, and stealing private wealth. The finance ministry is the driving power behind all this, it is said off the record.

As I always say: the state - that includes explicitly Germany and the US as well - is a form of organised crime, one aspect of the Mafia mob.