Last night featured the Gunther Jauch talk show on Channel One (ARD). Of all the German political chat shows.....this one is the biggest draw for the German population. Part of this is the long history of the time-slot, and part is Mr Jauch who is considered the "Larry King" of German interviewers. He brings on the right guests....asks the right questions.....and brings the topics down to the regular guy on the street. A fair number of these German political chat shows are for the intellectual type view......the Sunday night show is designed for everyone.
So last night.....came the latest German interview with NSA's guy....Edward Snowden. NDR....one of the German public channels....somehow got a request in and did a decent interview of the guy...sitting in Moscow.
Gunter took the guy who did the interview....along with a Green political figure who believes in the Ed story entirely, a Pirate Party VIP who supports the anti-NSA slant, a BILD journalist who lays out the firm middle ground (the NSA is good and bad, for obvious reasons), and John Kornblum (former US ambassador to Berlin, a banker of sorts, and a fairly wise guy on the world).
The three anti-NSA talkers did a fair job for roughly the first half of the show. The audience tended to clap on their key points.
Somewhere around the half-way point of the show.....the BILD journalist and Kornblum start to lay out facts and establish some decent arguments. The key point? There were two. As Kornblum points out.....to think that Merkel is the one and only political figure that might be entwined into this collection effort.....is a joke. Dozens, hundreds, thousands.....was the emphasis. And the second key point.....as he accurately points out.....in ten years, this sort of spying will be considered child's play.
I have yet to see some reality from German journalists on the topic of the ease of people being spied upon. A German 14-year old kid in Trier....could easily bug the apartments of his six neighbors.
The same kid could hack into four-hundred personal email accounts from the various folks in Trier.
The same kid could build his own personal drone, and monitor the city twenty-four hours a day.
The same kid could build a bugging device and put it into the mayor's office.
The same kid could swipe the pin numbers to fourteen bank accounts in one hour while sitting on a park bench next to an apartment building.
The same kid could put a GPS-tracker onto the car of a Green Party official and note where they go during a normal week.
The same kid could take a bahn ticket....reproduce a fake ticket....and travel first-class from Frankfurt to Berlin every single day.
The same kid could hack into the DSDS 'search-for-teenie-singer-contest' and screw up the numbers enough to allow four marginal singers to make it into the quarter-finals.
The same kid could create a bogus bank account in Luxembourg for Chancellor Merkel....load the account with three hundred million Euro.....and make everyone suddenly think that Merkel herself has a secret bank account outside of the country.
The same kid could wipe out the entire email server system of Germany's top ten newspapers.
The same kid could take down the power grid for Frankfurt for sixty minutes.....just for entertainment purposes.
Not that I suggest that there is such a kid....but to think that the big bad NSA is the only creature of evil out there, and wiping them out would 'save-the-world'.....is entirely bogus. On this, Kornblum is absolutely correct. The Germans are missing the big picture. Technology has delivered a wonderful thing that we all use daily....and some would use the same technology for great evil. We seem to overlook that fact.
As for Ed's pitch and delivery? Ed is a geek with a naive sense of the world around him. Ed's never dealt with any jihad characters. For Ed, it's a world of terrible things which NSA has stumbled into, and only Ed can fix the wrongs....bringing the world back into a ethical sense of purity. For some reason.....I'm just not putting money on Ed's argument.
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