At the same time, however, Germany is experiencing a heated debate about the transparency of information and data collection. Now that companies such as Google, Twitter and Facebook publish transparency reports, the number of customer data requests a government files each year has been made public. A recent report suggests that, despite the Germans being fearful of government intrusion into people's private lives, their government made more than twice as many requests for customer data collected by the search engine Yahoo as the UK, second only to the US. Is Merkel thus being somewhat two-faced? 

The leaked NSA files do not indicate clearly what form of surveillance has taken place — her conversations only or her movements too? In any case, anyone who has to go through this mass of data should probably be pitied. With a chancellor who is famously plain in her tastes, very little in the way of extravagance and kinkiness is to be expected. The records might well have been the most boring exhanges imaginable-Merkel is hardly a JFK or a Bill Clinton. 

Adding insult to injury, the affair turns out to be even more frustrating on a different level: Germany, as one commentator suggested, simply doesn't have the technical know-how to find out how the spying was done. 

Technology was once the basis for post-war Germany's proudest boast: "export world champions". Now not only does China seem better at it, but the Americans are in a different league. What's next? If the Americans invent something as good as bratwurst, Germany might as well become the 51st state.

Perhaps our notoriously metaphysical brand of philosophy will at last come into its own, helping us to find our way through this moral maze where everyone can spy on    everyone else, yet still be called a friend.