It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who knows their history that Germany is a nation that’s deeply suspicious about state surveillance. In fact, Germans consider privacy an absolute right and an integral aspect of modern democracy.

That’s why the netzpolitik.org controversy this summer came as such a shock. When the German government launched a treason investigation into two netzpolitik journalists for reporting on secret plans to expand online surveillance, Germans leapt to the reporters’ defense. The hashtag “#Landesverrat” (treason) was almost instantly trending on Twitter, and their case generated protests on the street, too.

The German government has since closed the case on the grounds that the leaked documents did not constitute a state-secret and fired a top prosecutor over the matter. But the entire episode serves as a warning for Germans — and anyone else — who care about openness and transparency. Because without the public outcry, it’s likely the investigation would have continued, and the journalists would have faced legal action. And if something like this can happen in Germany, one of the most open countries in the world, it can happen anywhere.

There is a startling parallel to the Spiegel Affair in the 1971 Pentagon Papers leak in the United States. In that instance, American authorities charged whistleblowers Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo under an Espionage Act from 1917 and the attorney general at the time obtained a court injunction to stop The New York Times from publishing the documents. In a similar fashion to the Spiegel Affair, a judge eventually dismissed charges against Mr. Ellsberg after it was discovered that White House officials had engaged in illegal efforts to discredit the whistle-blowers. But where the Spiegel Affair marked a turning point in the political and democratic culture of post-war Germany, the release of the Pentagon Papers has had no such effect on the American public.

Read the article “It’s Time the World Stood up for the Whistleblowers” on csmonitor.com.