Germany’s Cyber Security Law and Policy in Historical Perspective

According to the New York Times, German chancellor Angela Merkel put the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance on her personal communications on a level with Eastern Germany’s notorious department of state security, the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (StaSi). The Guardian reported on Tuesday on Merkel’s plain-spoken “This is like the Stasi” that she confronted President Barack Obama with, responding to the respective Snowden revelations in October.

Merkel’s statement reflects Germany’s political culture of privacy, which has evolved as a result of well-known collective experiences in the 20th century. Eastern Germany’s Stasi penetrated a whole population to an unparalleled extent, often resulting in more dreadful than privacy related infringements. Before the German Democratic Republic (GDR) set up its pervasive surveillance, 3rd Reich’s secret state police, Hitler’s Geheime Staatspolizei (GeStaPo), had already a solid grip on the population and its political orientation.

This is another historical trauma that, together with GDR’s StaSi, keeps privacy in contemporary Germany highly valued. It does not only provide a telling historical context for Merkel’s remarks. It also illuminates the provenance of Germany’s comparably strict and protective privacy laws that govern public and private conduct in cyberspace, as well as the broad, critical resonance that the revelations of the NSA’s surveillance measures have triggered across the country.