Getty Germany needs to calm down The country’s political left is hyperventilating over a string of spying revelations.

The news that Germany’s BND intelligence service regularly shared classified information with the NSA is the latest in the country's ongoing debate about surveillance. The story reached a climax when the American CIA station chief was asked to leave Berlin in July after the revelation, the year prior, that the US had tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone. Though much of the outrage is clearly genuine, some groups in Germany are doing their best to egg it on.

The extent of German outrage is perplexing to many Americans, as is American ambivalence about the matter to many Germans. Most coverage of the scandal explains German indignation with a phrase or two about the history of the Stasi, the East German secret police, notorious for its surveillance of the public.

Yet this explanation for German outrage at their intelligence service is unconvincing. The entire East German population in 1990 was 16.11 million, equal to a fifth of today’s Germany. Most Germans never lived under Stasi surveillance and have no personal recollection of it. This is not to say that Germans do not value privacy, or that certain NSA actions — such as wiretapping Merkel’s cell phone — were justified. But the suspicion is that many German groups are doing what they can to make the situation as bad as possible for their own gain.

Germany’s socialist parties are the worst offenders. America-bashing is hardly new territory for Die Linke, a not insignificant far-left party, which consists mainly of former communist party members from the GDR years and disgruntled former Social Democrats. Die Linke seeks to criticize America every chance it gets, and its political agenda includes withdrawing Germany from NATO and joining a Russia-friendly security alliance. The party has recognized Crimea as a legitimate part of Russia and rejects the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations with the US. Rumors of US surveillance and espionage help to inflate paranoia and conspiracy theories about the US, undermining Germany’s relationship with the West and bolstering Die Linke’s platform in local and federal governments.

Die Linke overlooks a key part of its own history: some of its members ruled East Germany with an iron fist and regularly spied on its citizens. In those days, the Stasi directly tapped phone calls of fellow citizens. By comparison, the NSA’s collection of metadata from phone calls is a much lesser offense: the NSA collects information about calls such as phone numbers, call duration and time stamps — not call content — and the US Supreme Court has ruled this practice to be consistent with the Fourth Amendment.

Even more inconsistent is the reaction of the Social Democrats (SPD), who are taking a leaf out of Die Linke’s playbook to pounce on Merkel’s center-right majority with whom they share a coalition government. Sigmar Gabriel, the economy minister and Social Democratic leader, made headlines this week when he chided the German parliament, saying the NSA and BND were engaged in economic espionage despite Merkel’s claims to the contrary.

“There is no need to get ‘okays’ from the Americans,” SPD parliamentary leader Christine Lambrecht said, insisting that the list of search terms given to the BND by the NSA be made public.

Such statements suggest that the Americans somehow unlawfully forced intelligence cooperation upon their German colleagues, when in fact BND head Gerhard Schindler sought out new ways for the two countries to work together. Both Die Linke and the SPD have called for two of Germany’s highest-ranking cabinet members, the minister of the interior and the foreign minister, to step down. Listening to SPD leaders rail about the affair, one could easily forget that intelligence sharing between NATO allies has been a major transatlantic initiative since 2001.

Despite the controversy, there is still no evidence the BND actually spied on German citizens, a prohibition enshrined in a Memorandum of Agreement with the NSA in 2002 when the BND was installed at Bad Aibling, an airfield operated by the US Army since WWII, and under NSA command since the 1970s. A May 2015 article in Der Spiegel admitted the targeting of a European firm was due to its association with suspicious individuals and a possible illicit transfer of funds, both solid reasons for closer examination.

Die Linke and the SPD have thus far been silent about the many successes of the intelligence-sharing program. These include the foiling of the Sauerland terrorist cell plot and the uncovering of radicalized Germans headed to Syria, neither of which would have been possible without American technology and assistance. In its focus on steering their country away from the U.S., the German left is silent about other countries' surveillance activities within its borders. Intelligence gathering missions by China and Russia receive hardly any media attention and have not dissuaded the Germans from clamoring to join China’s newly minted Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

Nor is the German left alone in arguing that the US violates German privacy. German companies are increasingly pushing Berlin and Brussels to limit American tech companies, whose services are widely used by Europeans, primarily arguing that their success inhibits European competitors. Accusations that the American firms are complicit with digital privacy abuses and US spying, however, add fuel to the fire. US tech companies have become, according to a September 2014 Economist report, ersatz targets for resentment stemming from Edward Snowden’s revelations.

The close relationship between Germany companies and the government is no secret. But exploiting the public’s fears about privacy violation does nothing to help the German public, neither in terms of economic development nor security.

Martha R. Simms is the Director of Operations at the John Hay Initiative in Washington, D.C.