I read this above report and can't believe it.
When that this happen?
Our data privacy laws are thorough and sometimes an obstacle, but many projects got stopped because of privacy issues:
e.g. the digital stored medical records on ones health insurance card
The stop of the data retention directive by our beloved Bundesverfassungsgericht (they are awesome) is another milestone.
Core of our privacy law is that every person is entitled to reign over it's own data as the person pleases, thus every personal data processing is forbidden as long as there isn't a law allowing it.
Thank you for the reply. can't believe I forgot all about Germany! I sometimes joke we would have been better off (privacy-wise and financially) if we would have become a federal state of Germany in the '50s. Our Gilder was already linked to the German Mark and you are our largest trade partner. We seem to have the same financial 'hard money' line as well. I visit Germany a lot and am always amazed by the hospitality.
likewise! I was several times in NL and perceived you guys the cooler germans.
This open minded culture I adored seemed so fixed to me. I hope this conservative backlash will diminsh.
American here, have only visited NL and DE for a few weeks, never lived there.
It was also my perception that the Dutch had a live-and-let-live toleration, that seems like the opposite of the monitoring regime described in the comment. (I'm not really referring to marijuana, I'm speaking more generally.) To this naive outsider, who admittedly has something of a crush on Amsterdam, that level of monitoring is puzzling.
But maybe all those bike roads and dikes point to another aspect of the culture -- a little too well-supervised and well-engineered.
I didn't think marijuana was such a big thing there? I was under the impression that it was mostly just a tourist thing rather than a real part of the local culture
Well to be honest, in retrospect the present Germans are lucky as compared to other countries that they already are educated either first, or second hand about the issue of government knowing everything. Another point could be made is that thank god it happened during the low tech era and not today because a Hitler-esque figure armed with a German equivalent of Google would positively fuck up the entire world with even better efficiency.
Sort of, yes, back then our state records showed nicely who was and wasn't Jewish. So we got a law that forbids religion to be listed in these records. And now we log everything else.
What alas struck me as odd in Germany that after ww2 and the Stazi in east germany you still have manditory ID cards + registration when you move with the police! and you get upset about street view?
In this context it sounds a little scary either way(don't the local police have access to local government records so same difference.) It could be quite innocuous, like being registered to vote, and needing to know in which local elections you can participate.
This might sound like a Godwin, but I guess we're slowly building our own Stasi and need to experience it first before we realize what happened. If it's not too late.
With right-extremist nutters like Wilders, economical decline, and the singling-out of a certain demographic (muslims), which happens internationally, it's more likely than you think. Yellow stars embroidened on coats have been replaced with profiles in large databases containing a billion times more profiling data though, instead of a simple yellow-starred label.
Gladio is a very interesting topic! Especially since a BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) group appears to have to been involved in the Münchener Oktoberfest-Bombings from 1980 killing 21 people.
I read this above report and can't believe it. When that this happen?
Our data privacy laws are thorough and sometimes an obstacle, but many projects got stopped because of privacy issues:
e.g. the digital stored medical records on ones health insurance card
The stop of the data retention directive by our beloved Bundesverfassungsgericht (they are awesome) is another milestone.
Core of our privacy law is that every person is entitled to reign over it's own data as the person pleases, thus every personal data processing is forbidden as long as there isn't a law allowing it.
But fear not my fellow neighbors, the EU comission (not so beloved) might overhaul the data privacy laws and you might gain citizen rights back: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/newsroom/data-protection/news/12...