THE National Security Agency scandal has given us Germans a nostalgic summer. How self-assured we have been, especially we journalists, in lambasting the alleged surveillance of our e-mail and phone calls by American spooks. It reminds us how far we’ve come from our various totalitarian pasts — a point of pride as much as humility.

Throughout the debate, though, I have had a slight feeling of complacency. I don’t deny the dangers in storing huge amounts of data. But we Germans are getting upset for the wrong reasons.

The German concern for data protection stems from the early 1980s, when the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that every citizen had the right to know who kept what data on him, particularly the state. As a result, data storage as such — regardless of whether anybody actually reads it — is considered an infringement on civil liberties. Since then we have not really updated our understanding of privacy, despite the advent of the Internet, fiber-optic cables and smartphones.

Among other things, such obsolescence leaves us unable to communicate our concerns with the United States. If we could find more contemporary explanations for our angst, we would probably find it easier to convince our American friends that it is important to agree on international standards on data protection. Somewhere between German paranoia and American naïveté lies the proper degree of concern. But where?