Troubling Questions: No-Spy Pact Backfires on Berlin

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http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/merkel-chief-of-staff-pofalla-announces-german-us-no-spy-pact-a-916353.html

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The No-Spy Pact

Just last Friday, BND chief Gerhard Schindler sent NSA Director Keith B. Alexander a written request that discussions over a mutual no-spying pact be initiated. It is to be the placebo administered to the public at election time, to pacify brewing concern and say, "Look, everything is going to be just fine."

Yet the establishment of such a no-spying agreement implies that espionage has been allowed up to now, an unwitting confirmation of the information in the documents leaked by Snowden -- including the internal paper that SPIEGEL reported on this week: As a target of espionage, Germany ranks somewhere in the middle of the priority list, about on par with France and Japan. In the leaked document, the US notes a particular interest in Germany's foreign policy and economic situation, citing threats to the financial system and "economic stability" as high-priority subjects of interest when it comes to spying in the European Union.

The no-spying agreement isn't likely to make the NSA scandal disappear. On the contrary, Berlin will be faced with new questions: What should comprise such a pact? Will it only pertain to the work of foreign intelligence agencies? Or will it address the interests of citizens whose Internet data flow through American servers and can potentially be captured and cached? None of this has been definitively answered, all written assurances to the contrary.
Pofalla obviously anticipated what new questions might be raised by the envisaged agreement. It was he who carefully said that the US agency would not have made the offer, "if their assurance that they would abide by the law were not true." This is twisted logic -- logic that only Pofalla himself could explain.