I don't care about Merkel's privacy. But I do care about the fact that she cares about her privacy, and that Germans care about the privacy of their elected Chancellor. Both of those feed into the relationship between Germany and the USA, and that relationship is important enough that the NSA should not put it at risk (or be allowed to be able to put it at risk).
Being a German I only care for Mrs. Merkels privacy because that was the first (and only) moment, when she got upset.
Having her 80 million citizens spied upon by the NSA was no reason to issue a statement. Or to do her job and protect the German people from harm, as it is stated clearly in our constitution as the job of our leaders.
On the contrary. Before anything was really on the table, they declared the topic closed.
So the moment she herself is being spied upon is the moment she (at last) wakes up? Well, really? That does seem quite a little bit egoistic to me, doesn't it.
Isn't every citizen of this country worth the same? Has the same rights to be protected from arbitrary spying?
Well the Germans reelected her with great majority. And the NSA spying is really no big deal for most of my fellow citizens. They just don't care. So the answer to my question above is probably "No".
They just have this "I have nothing to hide, so who cares" mentality, that is so dangerous, so dumb and sheep-like.
Same thing occurred to me. It is so telling, and yet so sad that our leaders care so much for their own privacy, yet so little for that of others, even those that they supposedly represent & protect.
What can we do? We are being abused, yet we are powerless to stop it.
I don't think you will find the path away from pervasive surveillance in the G10 nations. They all have their own well-equipped secret police.
At some point though, some head of state will calculate that the only way to win is to not play the game, and make policy that defends against all surveillance, because the value of their own surveillance is low enough to do without.
