On the other hand Germans might be saying 'They might be snooping bds but at least they're our snooping bds'.
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Actually I would prefer to be snooped on by a foreign country, because they have less influence on me.
I've made the same argument before: Fear the power closest to you.
I have little to fear from the US or China spying on me because they have (realistically, discounting e.g. Seal Team Six) much less control over me than the Irish government. But that only holds true because I'm not travelling to the US and I'm not doing anything they'd care^ about. If I was doing something that the US government cared about, then it doesn't really matter where I am.
^ i.e., illegal, dangerous, hostile etc. FYI: I'm a boring regular guy
I'm not so sure. I think these guys are all in it together ("Hey, could you spy on our citizens and let us know if there are any terrorists? We're not allowed to do it").
In a democracy, I'd rather that the actual snooping was done by my own government, as (theoretically) I could do something about it. I can file a lawsuit, or elect new representatives.
Not that this always works, but at least it's something.
Germany has many secret police's individual landers have them as well this woudl be like Texas or Yorkshire having its own equivalent of MI5.
There is also the scandal of Germanys police secret and normal missing a hard right terrorist group that killed several people - of course they where not ethnic Germans they killed which makes you wonder
Revealed during hearings in a Munich court, the hidden life of Beate Zschäpe, a mousy, bespectacled 38-year-old with the looks of a librarian, has given Germany a chilling insight into the clandestine workings of its neo-Nazi movement.
In the biggest home-grown terrorist scandal since the days of the Baader Meinhof gang in the 1970s, her group is accused of carrying out ten murders, two bombings and 15 bank robberies during a 13-year campaign.
Worse still, Germany's police and spy agencies thought that the killings, dubbed the "kebab murders" because they targeted mainly Turkish immigrants, were part of a feud within the Turkish mafia.
On Thursday, a parliamentary report into how Miss Zschäpe's gang went undetected branded the affair a "a humiliating defeat" for the German security services, saying that they had "dramatically underestimated" the neo-Nazi threat. Her trial has also cast a shadow over next month's elections, with the chancellor, Angela Merkel, pondering the darker side of the German psyche during a visit last week to the Dachau concentration camp, just outside Munich.
"How could Germans go so far as to deny people human dignity and the right to live based on their race, religion, political persuasion or sexual orientation?" she asked, standing on a plaza where Dachau inmates once assembled daily for roll call.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/102...
Germany has no secret police. Germany has intelligence agencies and there is one "Landesamt fuer Verfassungsschutz" (State Authority for the Protection of the Constitution) in each german state (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_of_Germany) and one coordinating "Bundesamt fuer Verfassungsschutz" (Federal State Authority for the Protection of the Constitution). None of these has any police authority, e.g. if they want to arrest you they have to go to the police, a judge has to allow your arrest and then you can get arrested - by the police.
The last secret police in Germany was the Ministry for State Security (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi) in East Germany. The last secret police for Germany in whole was the Gestapo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestapo) - we've wised up after that and decided to stop mixing intelligence agencies and police.
I was using the general term but compared then to MI5 so it was obvious that I did not mean a stasi style organization.
Even so I was very concerned that local government has its own Intelligence Agencys and i take a more relaxed relaxed view over the NSA and GCHQ than most HN commentators