Some months ago, maybe early this year, I had a talk with a friend of mine who is with the BND (the German CIA), he confirmed something that to my surprise not many in public even seem to imagine: (translated) "Anti-terror-spionage is massively fueled by interests of industrial spionage, and the latter hides behind the first. You use the war on terror to gain profits from fields that have nothing to do with counter terror, but who can benefit from intel acitivities being widened in the name of counter terror intelligence. American intelligence activities are the major concern for european intel services today - the lion's share of industrial spionage we experience today is not by the Russians or Chinese, but the Americans. The chinese are second only, although growing. however, they are not as penetrating as the ameicans are, for they focus on product pirating first and stratgeic and political spionage second, while the Americans focus on strategic and political spying first and industrial spionage second. When we get data from the Americans we need to countercheck it four and five times to evade the fate of getting manipulated too often."
Believe it or not, I don't really care. Its not me saying all that, but a professional insider whom I deeply respect as a person, and whom I trust as a professional. So I'm just the messenger here.
A strange ally we have. We need to defend against him as much as against the declared enemy, it seems, and he uses the shared enemy as an alibi to raise his intelligence efforts against us, and in increasing dimensions. If you fly into the Us these days, Germans need to give most snsitive personal data to a foreign authority that even German authority would have no right to demando from you so easily, and it will be stored for 15 years withoiut any european institution having any trustworthy idea of what will be done with this data.
That same guy I quoted told me that I will need to be more aware of my internet comms and postings, and should take into account to drastically change by communication behavior.
Alraedy in 2003 I wrote that I am sure that my IP and avatar surely are already saved and my postings have triggered automatic word filters in some american ELINT networks. Since quite some time I am not using emails anymore to communicate with certain friends and get messages of certain content from them. Our own interior minster is fighting for legalizing secret onlince reasearch of private, unaware user's PC harddisks.
With this spy game around, and all that PC madness and EU's conspiracy with Islam it really is a nice time to become paranoic.
There is only one rescue to save the mood: