For over a year, Germans have expressed mounting outrage at revelations of American espionage in their country. The opportunity to shake one’s head and wag one’s finger, especially at uncouth Americans, is one that many Germans enjoy, and Washington’s eavesdropping on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone, attempts to recruit officers from the federal intelligence service (BND) as moles, and monitoring citizens’ telephonic metadata, have brought about a crisis in German-American relations not seen since the run-up to the Iraq War. As a means of explaining the outcry, journalists and politicians resort to dubious comparisons of the Gestapo and Stasi, the domestic intelligence services of two, totalitarian regimes that blatantly violated the rights of the German populous. So great was German anger at the United States that Berlin took the unprecedented step of expelling the CIA station chief, a move normally reserved for adversaries, not allies.

Now, however, the shoe is on the other foot. Last month, the Suddeutsche Zeitung reported that Germany had listened in on telephone conversations conducted by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as well as her successor, John Kerry. Unlike the American spying, however, this surveillance was apparently unintentional, the mere “by-catch” that inevitably goes with signals intelligence. Given the BND’s allegedly sparse collection of just 2 conversations conducted by American officials, and its immediate deletion of one of them (the Kerry phone call), it would be unfair to compare Washington’s extensive and deliberate surveillance of German targets with Berlin’s seemingly haphazard and accidental retrieval of American ones.