Just When One Believed That We Had Reached The Maximum Incompetence Level...

... suddenly a wild Hans Peter Uhl (CSU expert on being old) appears and tells us (via golem):

I have seen the Hitler-diaries in a different magazine. In hindsight that was also something completely different than the truth.

Well, awesome that you remember that episode from 30 years ago Mr. Uhl. It just does not have anything to do with Snowden, or the NSA, or Spiegel. We know for a fact that these documents are real because the US government admitted as much. Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Damien Pickart on why military access to guardian and other websites is blocked:

"If that particular website runs an article that our filters determine has classified information... the particular content on that website will remain inaccessible,"

Why will these people be most likely re-elected? Even if one does not care about being spied on for no reason with basically no oversight, then one should still feel disgusted by the stuff that comes out of the coalition parties. This person is supposed to control the BND and other intelligence services and has nothing better to do than to say that:

We will answer all questions and in the end the result has to be: the German intelligence service  abides by the German privacy laws.

That just is not how parliamentary control works. He is not supposed to a cheerleader for the BND. He is also not supposed to answer questions in that role but to ask them.

Still nobody is saying how the NSA accesses the communications meta-data of German citizens. OK, then it wasn't the BND. I don't care, who it wasn't! It is the BND's job to find out how they did it and put an end to the warrantless collection of phone call, IP, and e-mail meta-data. If it is not capable of doing what it is supposed to do aka. counter-intelligence, then we need a structural reform. We need a secret service that is more than just a NSA pet, and begs for US data because it is not able to do either intelligence or counter-intelligence work. The only noteworthy thing the BND has done in recent history was to provide Curveball to the US. That did not play out so well, did it? Ok, back in the 1960ies there may have been a time when the BND was a bit more than an US play thing but these times are long gone. Perhaps Uhl has some stories about those good old times, but more importantly I want a capable intelligence service back.