How hard is it to just not try to buy some stolen data, do not col­lect maybe about a cou­ple of hun­dred mil­lion eu­ros, and show the world you're se­ri­ous about not be­ing nazis and com­mu­nists any­more? First of all I'm sur­prised there even is a dis­cus­sion about this, when it's clear­ly a holo­caust of wrong.

What it boils down to is that some peo­ple in the Ger­man gov­ern­ment think they can get away with every­thing the con­sti­tu­tion doesn't let them do as long as they can pay crim­i­nals to do it for them, and they don't mind if those crim­i­nals op­er­ate out­side of Ger­many, break­ing laws in coun­tries Ger­many pre­tends to re­spect as sov­er­eign states. The whole neo-con­ser­v­a­tive crap Guan­tanamo Bay and oth­er loop­holes are based on to just make things legal­ly com­pli­cat­ed enough for not to bright politi­cians to en­ter the lev­el of "If you be­lieve it your­self it's not re­al­ly ly­ing". Giv­en the pos­si­bil­i­ties of this ap­proach I won't be sur­prised if there would be a per­fect­ly le­gal way to get the same re­sult as some geno­cide, but with­out some­thing that is re­al­ly legal­ly tech­ni­cal­ly geno­cide. So there's noth­ing wrong with that then?

Be­cause there also seems to be no dis­cus­sion about whether it's a good idea or not. There's a lot of le­gal peo­ple dis­cussing it as if when it turns out to be le­gal to do it that au­to­mat­i­cal­ly means it's the right thing to do. So even if the high­est court would say it's com­plete­ly le­gal to go on with it, what's the prob­lem? The prob­lem is that to ob­tain the stolen data you'll have to deal with the crim­i­nal who stole the data. If it was a Ger­man spy who's just on the pay­roll of the Ger­man se­cret ser­vice and prob­a­bly swore some oath and plays by the rules it would be a dif­fer­ent sto­ry, but how can we be so sure what we'll get will be as valu­able as we want to be­lieve? The sell­er is a crim­i­nal who's just in it for the mon­ey and if Ger­many is se­ri­ous about fight­ing crime how ex­act­ly does this deal go down with the sell­er not run­ning the risk of get­ting caught and we're not run­ning the risk of buy­ing a copy of "Nev­er gonna give you up" for two and a half mil­lion eu­ros?

What­ev­er data is ob­tained this way is taint­ed data. All these peo­ple claim­ing that not buy­ing the data would let any­one rich enough to be able to af­ford a Swiss bank ac­count get away with their crimes don't seem to re­al­ize that the re­al­ly rich maybe have al­ready paid the sell­er to have their data re­moved from the list. What are we go­ing to do about that? And things get even more in­ter­est­ing if the sell­er likes to fil­ter the data in a way the Ger­man gov­ern­ment would nev­er be al­lowed to do. If it turned out there were only Jewish names on the list, would the Ger­man gov­ern­ment still be hap­py to vig­or­ous­ly pros­e­cute them, or would they then re­al­ize they are then just the tool of some crim­i­nal who set them up with taint­ed data, which was all per­fect­ly le­gal? And wouldn't that make it per­fect­ly le­gal for Ger­many to only go af­ter the Jews?

Ap­par­ent­ly for a cou­ple of hun­dred mil­lion eu­ros they would. It's amaz­ing how the amount of mon­ey in­volved com­bined with how much they think they need it plays a huge role in the dis­cus­sion. Ger­many seems to no longer be able to af­ford to live with­in the laws of it's own con­sti­tu­tion. They screwed up again, they need re­sources to keep their cit­i­zens hap­py, so they in­vade a neigh­bor­ing coun­try. And it's all pre­sent­ed as if this will at once solve the whole fi­nan­cial cri­sis Ger­many is cur­rent­ly in. But we're only talk­ing about an amount of mon­ey the size of a sin­gle Elbphil­har­monie. It makes no sense to sell out the con­sti­tu­tion for peanuts like that.

And we're only talk­ing about tax­es, not war crim­i­nals or child rap­ing priests. Un­less you're aim­ing for every­one to be equal­ly poor you'd bet­ter pay at­ten­tion to where the tax is still com­ing from. If some­one paid one mil­lion in tax­es, but was sup­posed to pay 1.1 mil­lion, can you af­ford to get that last 0.1 mil­lion and then next time miss out on the 1.1 mil­lion al­to­geth­er be­cause that tax pay­er then moved to a more friend­ly coun­try? It's not like every Ger­man with a Swiss bank ac­count doesn't pay any tax­es at all, so the end re­sult of try­ing to get more mon­ey could ac­tu­al­ly be hav­ing less mon­ey. Un­less you shoot the rich while they try to leave the coun­try.

Those who want to make a deal with a crim­i­nal also don't seem to re­al­ize this be­hav­ior trig­gers a whole sys­tem of crime. Without Ger­many cre­at­ing a mar­ket for stolen data the val­ue of Swiss bank data isn't that high. But by of­fer­ing mil­lions for it to crim­i­nals sud­den­ly any IT-guy who might have ac­cess to this data has to fear for his chil­dren be­ing kid­napped and be­ing asked for the data as ran­som. So how many kid­napped Swiss chil­dren is Ger­many will­ing to ac­cept to get to a few bil­lion eu­ros?

Or can Ger­many just claim to be stu­pid enough to not re­al­ize what was go­ing on again? The scary thing is that a lot of peo­ple in­volved re­al­ly seem to be that stu­pid…