June 29, 2013

By MALTE SPITZ

BERLIN ­ IN May 2010, I received a brown envelope. In it was a CD with
an encrypted file containing six months of my life. Six months of
metadata, stored by my cellphone provider, T-Mobile. This list of
metadata contained 35,830 records. That’s 35,830 times my phone
company knew if, where and when I was surfing the Web, calling or
texting.

The truth is that phone companies have this data on every customer. I
got mine because, in 2009, I filed a suit against T-Mobile for the
release of all the data on me that had been gathered and stored. The
reason this information had been preserved for six months was because
of Germany’s implementation of a 2006 European Union directive.

All of this data had to be kept so that law enforcement agencies could
gain access to it. That meant that the metadata of 80 million Germans
was being stored, without any concrete suspicions and without cause.

This “preventive measure” was met with huge opposition in Germany.
Lawyers, journalists, doctors, unions and civil liberties activists
started to protest. In 2008, almost 35,000 people signed on to a
constitutional challenge to the law. In Berlin, tens of thousands of
people took to the streets to protest data retention. In the end, the
Constitutional Court ruled that the implementation of the European
Union directive was, in fact, unconstitutional.

In Germany, whenever the government begins to infringe on individual
freedom, society stands up. Given our history, we Germans are not
willing to trade in our liberty for potentially better security.
Germans have experienced firsthand what happens when the government
knows too much about someone. In the past 80 years, Germans have felt
the betrayal of neighbors who informed for the Gestapo and the fear
that best friends might be potential informants for the Stasi. Homes
were tapped. Millions were monitored.

Although these two dictatorships, Nazi and Communist, are gone and we
now live in a unified and stable democracy, we have not forgotten what
happens when secret police or intelligence agencies disregard privacy.
It is an integral part of our history and gives young and old alike a
critical perspective on state surveillance systems.

When Wolfgang Schäuble, the interior minister from 2005 to 2009,
pushed for the implementation of the data-retention law, Germans
remembered the Stasi’s blatant disregard for privacy, as portrayed in
the 2006 film “The Lives of Others.” They recalled their visits to the
Hohenschönhausen district of Berlin, the site of the former Stasi
detention center.

They were reminded of the stories of their grandparents, about the
fear-mongering agents in the Gestapo. This is why Mr. Schäuble’s
portrait was often tagged provocatively with the phrase “Stasi 2.0.”

Lots of young Germans have a commitment not only to fight against
fascism but also to stand up for their own individual freedom. Germans
of all ages want to live freely without having to worry about being
monitored by private companies or the government, especially in the
digital sphere.

That was my motivation for publishing the metadata I received from
T-Mobile. Together with Zeit Online, the online edition of the weekly
German newspaper Die Zeit, I published an infographic of six months of
my life for all to see. With these 35,830 pieces of data, you can
follow my travels across Germany, you can see when I went to sleep and
woke up, a trail further enriched with public information from my
social networking sites: six months of my life viewable for everybody
to see what exactly is possible with “just metadata.”

Three weeks ago, when the news broke about the National Security
Agency’s collection of metadata in the United States, I knew exactly
what it meant. My records revealed the movements of a single
individual; now imagine if you had access to millions of similar data
sets. You could easily draw maps, tracing communication and movement.
You could see which individuals, families or groups were communicating
with one another. You could identify any social group and determine
its major actors.

All of this is possible without knowing the specific content of a
conversation, just technical information ­ the sender and recipient,
the time and duration of the call and the geolocation data.

With Edward J. Snowden’s important revelations fresh in our minds,
Germans were eager to hear President Obama’s recent speech in Berlin.
But the Barack Obama who spoke in front of the Brandenburg Gate to a
few thousand people on June 19 looked a lot different from the one who
spoke in front of the Siegessäule in July 2008 in front of more than
200,000 people, who had gathered in the heart of Berlin to listen to
Mr. Obama, then running for president. His political agenda as a
candidate was a breath of fresh air compared with that of George W.
Bush. Mr. Obama aimed to close the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, end
mass surveillance in the so-called war on terror and defend individual
freedom.

But the senator who promised to shut Guantánamo is now a second-term
president who is still fighting for its closure. And the events of the
past few weeks concerning the collection of metadata and private
e-mail and social-media content have made many Germans further
question Mr. Obama’s proclaimed commitment to the individual freedoms
we hold dear.

DURING Mr. Obama’s presidency, no American political debate has
received as much attention in Germany as the N.S.A. Prism program.
People are beginning to second-guess the belief that digital
communication stays private. It changes both our perception of
communication and our trust in Mr. Obama.

Even as a Green Party politician, I wasn’t impressed with Mr. Obama’s
focus on fighting global warming. While his renewed enthusiasm is
appreciated, it served as a distraction from the criticism he is
currently facing for allowing invasive state surveillance. He cannot
simply change the subject.

His speech caused many Germans to question whether Americans actually
share our understanding of the right balance between liberty and
security. In the past, we celebrated the fact that both countries
valued this balance, and there was huge solidarity with America after
9/11.

But the policy decisions of the Bush administration after the attacks
­ from waterboarding to Guantánamo ­ appalled Germans. We were shocked
to see this mutual understanding disappear. Now we are not sure where
Mr. Obama stands.

When courts and judges negotiate secretly, when direct data transfers
occur without limits, when huge data storage rather than targeted
pursuit of individuals becomes the norm, all sense of proportionality
and accountability is lost.

While our respective security services still need to collaborate on
both sides of the Atlantic to pursue and prevent organized crime and
terrorism, it must be done in a way that strengthens civil liberties
and does not reduce them. Although we would like to believe in the Mr.
Obama we once knew, the trust and credibility he enjoyed in Germany
have been undermined. The challenge we face is to once again find
shared values, so that trust between our countries is restored.

Perhaps instead of including a quote from James Madison in his speech,
arguing that “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of
continual warfare,” Mr. Obama should have been reminded of the quote
from another founding father, Benjamin Franklin, when he said, “They
that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Malte Spitz is a member of the German Green Party’s executive
committee and a candidate for the Bundestag in the September national
election.