United States Diplomatic Mission

The State and the Individual in the 21st Century
Leipzig, Runde Ecke
April 13, 2010
Ambassador Philip D. Murphy

It is a pleasure to be back in Leipzig – and to return to this museum. My first visit to Leipzig as Ambassador was on October 9, 2009.  It was an honor for me to be here to celebrate the Peaceful Revolution and the remarkable achievement of people from throughout the GDR who came together here in Leipzig to register their disagreement and their dissatisfaction with the SED regime.  We all know the consequences.  As a result of their brave actions, the government was toppled – and a new era began in Europe.

Let me pause here to express my condolences to the people of Poland, to the Kaczynski family, and to the families of all those killed in the terrible accident that took place on Saturday. President Kaczynski was a champion for democracy against an oppressive regime, a man whose journey took him from the Gdansk Shipyards to the presidency of a free people.  Lost alongside President Kaczynski and his wife were leaders from across the political spectrum, men and women who shaped and sped Poland's post-1989 democratic transformation. 

It is exactly that kind of commitment to freedom and human rights that made my visit to this museum last October so memorable.  On that occasion, Herr Holllitzer gave Consul General Brucker and me a private tour. That visit left a lasting impression.

Of course, I had heard about the Stasi but I came away from that visit with a much clearer understanding of how brave the citizens of the DDR had been in bringing about the Peaceful Revolution.  I also learned about how much effort and resources were expended in surveying, recording and documenting the activities and the lives of all those who lived here.  There is no way I can ever truly understand what it was like to live in the DDR but my visit last fall left me with a strong sense of how intrusive the government had been in the lives of its people and the mistrust that must have created.

The surveillance carried out by the Stasi, right here in this building, went beyond suppressing dissent.  The government faced little threat from violent acts or organized insurrection.  What it feared most were ideas – and its own people.  That kind of repression was perhaps one of the saddest effects of the Stasi on East German society because it was so pervasive. Chancellor Merkel has spoken on a number of occasions of the opportunities lost when fear and not freedom is the foundation of a society.  When she addressed the United States Congress last November, for example, she recalled her passion for the concept of the American dream – for the opportunity to make it in life through personal effort.  I had the privilege of attending both the speech in the Congress and of sitting in on her discussion with President Obama at the White House. This too left a lasting impression.

But Chancellor  Merkel was most eloquent in describing her personal experiences when she spoke at Joachim Gauck’s 70th birthday party this past January. “Ich habe gelitten darunter,” sagte sie, “dass man niemals an die Grenzen seiner Möglichkeiten gehen konnte, weil immer der Staat davor war.”

Clearly, however, the government could not completely repress the human spirit or ultimately prevent the free flow of ideas.  The Stasi used what was then modern technology to survey citizens and visitors with one goal in mind – to solidify the SED party’s continuing power.  But without the democratic mechanisms that allow people to be stakeholders in the actions of their government, history shows that people have no choice but to take to the streets.  They did so – you did so – in June of 1953, when the “pot boiled over” and the workers, the supposed bedrock of the SED system, rose up against intolerable economic measures  –  and again in 1989, when peacefully, you regained your voice in your own government.  That was, without a doubt, one of the most significant developments of the 20th century.

Today, thanks to your efforts, democracy and free speech are bedrocks of German society for all Germans.  Those rights were hard-won and it is right that there be an ongoing and rigorous discussion when any threat to those rights is perceived.  That is what democracy and civil society demands of its citizens. When we talk about the values and goals that our two countries share, it is that respect for democracy and the human spirit that it all comes down to.  This much I know even though the paths of history that have brought us to these common values have been very different.  The history of the United States has been an ongoing promise of liberty and equality.  For more than two centuries, we have strived to form that more perfect union, to seek a more hopeful world.  That is not to say that we have not made our share of mistakes.  There have been times when our actions at home and around the world have not lived up to our best intentions.  There have also been times – and there will be times in the future – when Germany and other countries in Europe and around the world do not see eye to eye with the steps we take along our  path.  Earlier I mentioned how difficult it was for me to imagine what life was like in the GDR.  By the same token, I realize how difficult it can be to understand sometimes how America and Americans tick.

The recent debate over health care reform in the United States is a case in point.  Health care reform has been a major political issue for decades in the United States.  Perhaps you followed the various arguments that were waged for and against the recent legislation and wondered, like many Americans incidentally as well, what is there not to like about health care.  The discussions covered a whole range of questions – questions that are not unfamiliar here in Germany. What will health insurance cost the government?  What will it cost employers?  And most important, what will the cost be to individuals?  How will health care providers and insurance companies be regulated?  But I think the most interesting part of the debate centered on the question of whether a mandated health care system was an encroachment of the federal government over its citizens.  Nowhere in the United States Constitution, some opponents said, is health insurance described as an absolute right – and nowhere does the Constitution require every individual to purchase health insurance or any good or service for that matter. Others argued otherwise. One of the most eloquent supporters of health care was the late Senator Edward Kennedy.  For Senator Kennedy, universal health care was the cause of his life, and as he wrote in a letter to President Obama in May of last year, shortly before his death, “the great unfinished business of our society.”  Senator Kennedy felt that health care should not be a privilege in society.  He felt, and again I quote from his letter to President Obama, “What we face is above all a moral issue.  At stake are not just the details of policy but fundamental principles of social justice.” 

The road to health care reform in the United States was long and complicated.  The discussion was at times loud and messy, but that is what democracy is all about.  As Winston Churchill said, “democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”  And on no other topic than social justice and the underlying themes regarding the rights, privileges, and responsibilities of citizens should the debate be more vociferous.  In the United States, that debate has focused in recent months on health care reform.  Here in Germany, Hartz IV has been the starting point for similar conversations. 

Another debate regarding the rights and privileges of individuals in society is being carried out on both sides of the Atlantic.  That is the right to privacy. Privacy is a hallmark of American society.  You can trace its roots back to the first settlers and the ''frontier'' mentality of the early pioneers.  Self-reliance, individualism, a healthy skepticism of government – these are characteristics that Americans pride themselves on. The protection of privacy has been fundamental throughout American history.  It traces its origins to the Bill of Rights, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. In 1928, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in a landmark judgment in America’s  first wiretapping case, "The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness . . .  They conferred the right to be let alone - the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” but that document and further judicial decisions established a framework for preventing government abuses of individual privacy, a framework that was extended by multiple laws in multiple judicial and economic sectors. 

In short, privacy is an issue in the United States that is as old as our country and our Constitution.  It is also as young as the new millennium. Years before he was called to the Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis wrote in the Harvard Law Review about his concerns regarding the new technology of "snapshot photography” – a technology that allowed newspapers to publish images of individuals without obtaining their consent.  Today over one hundred years later, computer networks can assemble, organize, analyze, and disseminate data from disparate sources at a speed and with an accuracy that Louis Brandeis, known before he became a Supreme Court judge as the “people’s lawyer,” could never have imagined.

Twenty-first century technology presents unprecedented new opportunities.  Data mining, cloud computing, social networking, online behavioral advertising, mobile marketing, the collection and use of information by retailers, data brokers, third-party applications, not to mention governments, present enormous new opportunities.  These tools can be used to advance democracy and human rights, fight climate change and epidemics, build global support for a world without nuclear weapons, and encourage sustainable economic development that lifts the people at the bottom up.  By providing people with access to knowledge and potential markets, networks can create opportunities where none exist.  In Kenya, farmers have seen their income grow by as much as 30 percent since they started using mobile banking technology.  In Bangladesh, more than 300,000 people have signed up to learn English on their mobile phones.  In Sub-Saharan Africa, women entrepreneurs use the Internet to get access to microcredit loans and connect themselves to global markets.

We were just discussing health care. New information technologies provide doctors online off-site access to applications and electronic medical records and reduce health care costs. New information technologies give us the opportunity to provide teachers with tools that can turn classrooms into even more vibrant places.  Government agencies can spend less time and taxpayer dollars on procedural items and more on providing service to citizens. New technologies are also changing the way individuals interact with each other.  A recent survey showed that 84 percent of Americans use e-mail; 57 percent store or share information through a social media site; 33 percent store photos online. These new technologies, however, raise privacy concerns to a new level.  Although Mark Zuckerman, the founder of Facebook, recently said that privacy is “no longer a social norm,” surveys in fact show that Americans' commitment to privacy has not diminished.  The challenge is to determine how best to protect privacy while supporting technological innovation.

But to be honest, it was the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 that made the debate about privacy a millennium concern. 9/11 marked the start of a new era.  Each of us, as private individuals, and each of us, as citizens of democracies, is threatened by groups such as Al Qaeda.  The goal of such extremist groups is to intimidate – to terrorize – modern societies and ultimately to destabilize and destroy them so they can be replaced by societies that correspond to their very particular views of the world.  Terrorism, raw and simple, extreme violence, unanticipated and random, with every single one of us as potential target and victim, is their strategy.  We’ve seen on our television screens or perhaps experienced even more personally how they work – in my country on 9/11, in England and Spain, where subways and trains were ruthlessly attacked.  We have seen how they might have worked in Germany, where plots to carry out similar acts of violence were revealed and the would-be perpetrators were brought to justice.  Unfortunately, we know that this threat will be with us for a long time.  This is an era which requires new information sharing tools to allow us to prevent such attacks.  Just as the Internet provides a streamlined form of increasingly simple and accessible channels of communication that can be used to the benefit of people, it can also be used for criminal and terrorist activities. Terrorists and extremists have set up shop on the Internet, using it to recruit new members, spread propaganda, raise funds across borders, and plan attacks across the world. 

Data privacy issues relating to security cooperation are one of the most important issues on German-American bilateral agenda.  The bottom line in these discussions is that protecting our citizens and protecting privacy are not mutually exclusive goals. 

The White House is deeply concerned about continuing terrorist plotting against U.S. and European countries and citizens.  President Obama is personally concerned about the serious security implications of the interruption the Terrorist Financing Tracking Program.   The Administration is fully committed to restoring the full functioning of the Program.  Over the past months, I have had many discussions regarding the Treasury Department’s Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, known as the SWIFT agreement, with the German government.  I have also met with representatives from the private sector and we have discussed how data privacy issues affect business activity here in Germany. I have come away from these discussions even more convinced of the need for appropriate data protection measures that allow governments to share information for counterterrorism and crime fighting purposes.  I have also come away from these discussions convinced that many of the perceived disagreements between Europeans and Americans over the SWIFT agreement specifically and more generally on data privacy arise from misunderstandings regarding the data privacy regimes of the other party.  President Obama has a serious commitment to fundamental data protection and privacy principles and we are conveying to our European counterparts that we take their concerns seriously and will look for practical solutions. I hope that we can move away from a debate about who has the better data privacy regime and towards an exchange of views that recognizes that although European and U.S. privacy protection systems may be differently structured, they are both effective at protecting individual privacy – and that our ultimate goals are the same. 

It has been my experience that whenever experts have sat down over the last several years to discuss these issues, the great number of commonalities was always clear.  These discussions, however, also underlined the necessity for an enhanced system of checks and balances to oversee and regulate information sharing.  That is no doubt and understandably a lesson learned from European history.  In the DDR, for example, as you know and as I learned last October here in this museum, there were no democratic institutions and oversight bodies to ensure that free speech was protected and that data collection programs were reasonable and carried out in a way that protected citizens’ rights. Over time, a “networked and layered” system of checks and balances to protect privacy developed in America – in line with our Constitution and our Bill of Rights. As a result, today, instead of just one unitary actor or type of actor responsible for overseeing government’s data privacy measures, in the United States, we have Privacy Officers, Inspectors General, the Government Accountability Office, a very independent Congress –to name just a few. Instead of just one data privacy law, we have a number of laws, including the 1974 Privacy Act, the E-Government Act of 2002, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and others, that collectively ensure that the government protects individual privacy. This collection of laws and the policies of our federal agencies ensure that when it is deemed necessary, information collection is transparent, that data is secured from theft or loss, that the collection has appropriate oversight, and that any individual, including a non-US citizen, can request access and receive effective redress if they believe their data has been misused.
 
Around the world, there exists a serious threat against open societies.  The potential gravity of an attack on an airplane, for instance, makes it necessary to screen passenger information to make sure we don’t allow someone to board a plane who intends to do harm.  Airport security screening measures are intended to protect all commercial air travelers from potential threats to safety and security and to effectively mitigate evolving terrorist threats.  This has to be an ongoing effort. New measures, for example, were introduced just last week to supersede emergency measures put in place immediately following the attempted attack that took place on Christmas Day last year.  These measures utilize multiple, random layers of security and are tailored to respond to intelligence about potential threats. They were developed after a rigorous interagency review process in consultation with the intelligence community and law enforcement – and with input from partners in government and industry around the world. Strengthened watch-listing systems, more flexible security protocols tailored to reflect the most current information available to authorities based on real-time, threat-based intelligence can only ensure the safety and security of passengers. In the United States, but also in a European Union without borders, there exist serious issues with transnational crime.  We want, we need, to make it more difficult, not easier, for criminals to cross our borders unimpeded. Last Friday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano met with her European counterparts in Madrid, Spain, as part of the U.S.-European Union Justice and Home Affairs Ministerial Troika, to discuss collaborative actions to increase information sharing, enhance security measures, and strengthen screening measures. Key partnerships, such as these between the United States and the European Union have resulted in closer operational cooperation on national security, enhanced efforts to combat terrorism and transnational crime such as human trafficking and ongoing initiatives to strengthen global cybersecurity.

In America, our commitment to the prevention of terrorism has a lot to do with our love of freedom and the freedom of movement we enjoy.  It is this freedom that we seek to protect. Authorities inside the United States have very little ability to stop people and ask them to produce identification. Unlike in European countries, we do not even have a national ID card. American hotels cannot require guests to submit passports to be copied and kept on file. In the United States, once you get into the country, there are few ways to identify and find people. The border is one of the few chances our authorities have to determine whether a person entering the country is authorized. Once somebody who intends harm is in, it is hard to go back and correct the mistake. 

Some would argue that if, in protecting our nation, we are not able to preserve a free and open society for our public lives, with commensurate respect for the privacy of our private lives, then the terrorists have won.  In the long run we cannot keep our citizens safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values.  These values are the foundation of the liberty and justice that both Germans and Americans want for their countries. 

That is why discussing this issue, in this venue, in this city, makes so much sense. Here, in this building, suppression of freedom of speech, perhaps the most fundamental of those values, was the primary goal of all the elaborate apparatus and the huge human and material resources that the Stasi consumed. 

I am told that in DDR times, people walking down the sidewalk in front of this building would automatically talk in whispers.   The lesson of this building and the museum that you have established here is that free communications among citizens in a democracy is an absolute necessity for democracy to exist and to work.  That is a lesson that all Americans understand and appreciate.  It is a lesson we will not forget, as we work with our friends in Germany and Europe to thwart the plans of terrorists whose only agenda is to destroy free societies.  We will ensure that our societies remain free and open for every citizen. Our values and our institutions are more resilient than a hateful, extremist ideology.  That, too, is a lesson that we both – Germans and Americans – understand and appreciate. 

Thank you for your attention.