Up pops another… and another

IF THE tawdry tale is confirmed, the Americans hired a German working for his country’s equivalent of the CIA as their double agent. A 31-year-old clerk sorting classified papers reportedly gave the Americans 218 documents in return for a paltry €25,000 ($34,000). Three concerned the committee in the Bundestag that is investigating revelations by Edward Snowden about American surveillance in Germany. So the Americans are spying on Germany’s parliament even as it looks into American spying.

This was followed on July 9th by news of a second American spy—though few details have been released. The downward spiral in German-American relations began with the Snowden affair and continued with news that America had tapped Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone. It seems that the Americans collect German metadata on a vast scale. American surveillance has caught up a 27-year-old computer-science student in Bavaria named Sebastian Hahn: his mistake was merely to run a server belonging to a network that encrypts internet communications.