Encryption For All Sponsored by German Govt.

fiffilinus writes: "The German Ministry of Economics uses the CeBIT computer fair as a forum to propagate its GnuPP (Gnu Privacy Project -- I know, it is *not* GPG, but GPG is part of the package) encryption package to the public, giving away CD-roms with the package. The CeBIT press release can be found here. The download for those who can't make it to CeBIT is here. The package is available in English too, but the page itself has to be put through the fish, as usual. Finally a government that moves in the right direction ..."

Comments

Re:But what's their motive?

[phaze3000]

Yet more evidence, if any was needed, that /. really needs a '-1 Needlessly paranoid' moderation item.

Security Concerns (Echelon) & Self-Promotion

[Donny Smith]

Their primary motive is to let German individuals and corporations protect themselves from Echelon and similar projects.
Which makes me think - no wonder France and Germany have their own Linux distributions and the U.K. doesn't! A grain of security concerns, a grain of national pride, and perhaps a grain of software nationalism, etc...
Get the funny part of the press release (I think they kind of screwed up the translation):
---------
...is safe and corresponds to international standards. It would not be recommended (sic!) to use standard software in security sensitive areas and the Ministry explicitly warns to do so in its press release.
---------

And of course they can't push MS products at CeBIT, it wouldn't help them in any way. But they had to do something and Linux has always made a good means for low-cost self promotion ...

Software Patents?

[guerby]

With a few thousands illegal patents delivered by europe software patent factory, it would be fun to count how many patents this government sponsored software infringes :). Hopefully some German politicians clearly said no to patents. After France, there's hope to get a software patents free Europe if Germany officials say no too.

Hmmm... Germany is looking better and better...

[Bonker]

First they decided to get rid of Windows in the government and are moving to OSS for all government IT installations if I remember correctly. Now they're promoting hard encryption for all their citezens. This seems like a government that truly cares about the rights of its citzens, especially where privacy and technology are concerned.

What is the catch? What makes Germany less or more desireable for people who are concerned about their rights as they relate to technology, privacy, or otherwise?

I know there are some english speaking Germans reading /. Enlighten us, please...

Re:Hmmm... Germany is looking better and better...

[Coolfish]

i think germania realized that in order to prevent anything resembling what happened with Hitler and the Nazis, the citizens must be free to think as they want, must be able to go on with their lives with the privacy and freedom that all humans deserve.

It seems the bigger a mistake is, the greater an opportunity there is to grow and learn from that mistake.

Re:Hmmm... Germany is looking better and better...

[Reality Master 101]

i think germania realized that in order to prevent anything resembling what happened with Hitler and the Nazis, the citizens must be free to think as they want, must be able to go on with their lives with the privacy and freedom that all humans deserve.

Ironically, you are free to think anything you want -- except if it has to do with Nazism. The Nazi party is banned in Germany. Understandable given the history, but German is hardly the home of free thinkers.

Re:Hmmm... Germany is looking better and better...

[Cynical_Dude]

Being from Germany, maybe I can describe my perceptions of the "local angle" here.

The German Government is likely less altruistic than people suspect here. The danger is clearly for German/European businesses being spied upon by you-know-who.

If you read the original release, you'll notice (near the bottom) the initiative is by the ministry of economics. They are trying to create awareness for IT security in the German corporate environment.

Maybe German politicians figured out that criminals (political radicals, organized crime, etc.) are already using crypto, so they have little to lose by having businesses adopt crypto on a large scale...

Your mileage may vary, just my 0.02, yadda yadda...

Re:Hmmm... Germany is looking better and better...

[__past__]

I am an "english speaking German reading /.", so i'll bite...

First, they aren't "moving to OSS for all government". The Bundestag will use Linux as servers (including authentication etc.), while the clients will get WinXP. Other federal institutions do pretty much what they want to.

Second, the german government does most certainly not care so much about civil rights as you may think. Especially after 9/11 (and yes, I know the WTC wasn't exactly a german institution, but most germans seem to have forgot) there was quite a great backslash in civil rights, especially regarding privacy.

For example, a few days after, the minister of inner affairs (?) Otto Schily proposed that police should have the right to know about any of your banking transactions. Also, they started the "Rasterfahndung", meaning that they would get all information about "suspect" persons - mostly muslimic students - from all kinds of sources, including their universities, power suppliers, post offices etc. Of course, some people noticed that this was unconstitutional, but well, who cares...

Another incident was some guy proposing to force ISPs to block certain sites, which some ISPs promply did (including some universities), althoug the guy proposing it did not have any authority to force it.

Even before, there's a long record of not-so-privacy-respecting incidents. One of the funnier ones was a law that tried to force ISPs to keep every piece of data their customers sent and recieved for IIRC 7 years, while of course guaranteeing confidentality when passing over this data to the police. Of course, the ISPs protested, if only because of the costs of keeping such an amount of data.

It's hard to compare the situation between two countries, scince most people just know one of them good enough, but germany if definitely not a civil rights paradise.

Re:Hmmm... Germany is looking better and better...

[__past__]

The Nazi party is banned in Germany.

Note, however, that it is not the only banned party. The communist party got banned as well, e.g..

Oh, and scince you seem to worry, there are still more than enough nazis aroung here, thank you. They still manage to kill a foreigner or to destroy a jewish cemetary once month or so. Of course, the good times of the early nineties are over, where nazis sieged a house inhabited mostly by vietnamese guest-workers for three days in Rostock, having fun with molotow-cocktails, applauded by their Volksgenossen, protected by the police, and supported by the free press.

It's not as if nazis weren't still a real problem in germany, you know.

Re:Hmmm... Germany is looking better and better...

[tempmpi]

For what it's worth, when I visited some relatives in Germany about 8 years ago (?), my uncle mentioned a couple of laws that I found absolutely astounding. First, it was illegal to leave your car (and house? Can't remember) unlocked for any period of time. If you are making multiple trips, you are required to lock the car between each trip. That's just the law (don't know if it was local or what).

I live in Germany and I must say that these laws are something like US sex laws, laws that maybe really exist but nobody cares about them.

I've been to Europe a couple of times in a number of countries. There is no question that Europe is a great place to visit, but there's no way I would ever live there. They have absolutely no concept of freedom.

People get much more freedom in most european countries. Look at the Human Freedom Index by the UN. Other Source here.

Not to mention that it has by far the best highway system in the world.

Never heard about the German Autobahn ? The german highway system where you can drive your car without a speed limit ?

Re:Hmmm... Germany is looking better and better...

[janolder]

Odd, as a native German having lived in Germany until 1995, I can't recall any laws that require you to lock your car or your house. Your relatives might have confused this with requirementes of their specific insurance company. Indeed, most German insurance companies will not cover theft if the car was unlocked at the time of being stolen. But this is certainly not a law by any stretch of the imagination.

As for having to obtain permission from the government to start a business... For most types of businesses, you only need to go to the local mayor's office, pay $15 and off you go. I've done it myself in order to start a consulting business. As other posters have pointed out, the only restriction is the location for certain types of business that impact the neighborhood. Like brothels, car shops, chemical plants, etc. In this respect, Germany uses zoning much like most of the US.

Having lived in both countries, the amount of freedom you have in either place depends on the subject matter. A few examples:

a) Certain unions in the US have much more power to restrict and constrict businesses than German unions do.

b) On the other hand, the German crafts laws are incredibly restrictive and certainly stifle competition. Fortunately, it looks like the EU will put an end to this hundreds of years old nonsense.

c) As for encryption and copy protection circumvention, Germany's laws have traditionally been far more liberal than the US's. Due to pressure from the US this is changing, sadly.

d) Prostitution is legal in Germany. Illegal in most of the US.

e) Any moron can carry a gun in the US. German gun laws are very restrictive.

f) There is no issue with nakedness on public beaches in Germany.

g) There is no issue with nakedness on TV in Germany.

h) There is no issue with nakedness in printed form in public places. (It is usually too cold for actual nakedness in public places. But there is no law against that either - unless a public disturbance is caused, by a flasher, for example)

The list goes on. On the whole, I prefer the US which is why I moved here a while back. But the statement that the US is more free than other countries requires some qualifiers.

Re:Hmmm... Germany is looking better and better...

[Get Behind the Mule]

I know there are some english speaking Germans reading /. Enlighten us, please...

Would you settle for an American who has lived in Germany for over fifteen years?

I have to agree with an earlier poster who suggested that by and large, German citizens are better educated and far and away more interested in politics and civil rights issues than Americans are. Hate to have to say that about my countrymen, but it's true. And ultimately, it's history that's responsible for that. Germans only have to look back one generation to see a time when they abandoned all respect for freedom, and it brought on unparalleled disaster. As a result, very many Germans today have a strong sense of responsibility to history that requires their active interest in politics and civil rights. Unfortunately, I miss this sense of duty among too many people in the US.

And another issue is simply fact that weak encryption and weak privacy policy is largely an interest of the United States, and hardly any one else shares the interest. It is widely suspected that American spooks are monitoring communications in countries like Germany, and they don't like it. Naturally, this kind of policy is precisely what they can and should do about it.

Having said all that, I must add that there are some laws and ideas I find very weird, especially concerning freedom of speech. The most astounding of all: You can prosecuted in Germany for insulting someone! You can criticize someone as sharply as you like, but if you utter something unconstructive such as "You're an asshole," you can be taken to court.

What's worse is that the penalty's are more severe if the insult is directed at a civil servant, such as a policeman or a bureaucrat.

I could rant on about this for a few more pages, but I think I'll just leave it there.

Re:But what's their motive?

[cperciva]

So why would the government of Germany want their citizens to talk without knowing what they arte talking about? In itself it doesn't make sense.

It does make sense: The German government is more concerned about the US government snooping on German citizens than it is about being able to do such snooping itself. It's a case of finding the lesser of two evils; they evidently decided that not being able to snoop on their citizens was less of a problem than having the US government snoop on their citizens.

Re:But what's their motive?

[Mr Windows]

The purpose of personal cryptography is to hide sensitive information from anyone who you don't want to read it; not just the Government. Various EU countries want strong encryption in order to protect European companies' trade secrets from (say) large foreign governments with big eavesdropping projects (what can I mean??).

Open source software is becoming more supported by EU countries for political reasons (Government should use non-proprietary tools), social reasons (open access), quality reasons (speaks for itself), and so on. There is quite a lot of money being spent on open-source development by various EU agencies, the German government being just one example of many. Sadly the UK government is in Microsoft's pocket at the moment :(

Re:There are cons too

[Reality Master 101]

Although most younger Germans are very friendly to Americans, many of the older folks are downright hostile. If you start speaking to them in English, they walk away.

Maybe those folks didn't speak English? It is Germany, you know. :)

To tell you the truth, I didn't encounter any of that when I was there. The people seemed really friendly. Of course, I have blond-haired blue-eyed German genes in me, but my attitude still screams "American!" from a mile away. :)

Liberty

[Jeppe Salvesen]

Europe has changed in 8 years. I don't know whether these laws in Germany have changed or not, though I suspect the EU mandated they be removed since they were in effect protectionist.

That being said, sometimes a bit of regulation is a good thing. If the gov't makes rules to force businesses to prove their product work and deliver what the commercial says, is that an infringement of liberty? Right now, you can buy a $5 blender at kmart that will work - once. The stronger consumer rights in (parts of?) Europe mandates warranties that keep such scams off the market. Things cost a bit more, but they appear to be working better and for longer than the stash I bought when I lived in the States.

Basically, more liberty for the consumer, less for the business. I believe that businesses that abuse their liberties should have those taken away, just like what happens when the citizens behave irresponsibly.

Re:The Problem is...

[CakerX]

what the fuck is everyones problem, why does everyone assume every move made by every goverment everywhere is evil. Come on, this is a good move done by a goverment for once. you should stop looking for hidden motives and enjoy the fact that somewhere out there there is a goverment not run by a deush-bag from texas who values a 1984 style goverment. Germany is making an already free technology more available to its citizens. I will give the German gov a BIG thumbs up about this one. No doubt there are many coders that will check to make sure there is no backdoor in the software, and if there is, you'll hear about tommorow on theregister.co.uk and /. the day after that.

Also another big thumbs up to germany from going from nazisim in WW2 to where they are today.

why is everyone so god damn paranoid, if you guys hit the ol' pipe without me I am gonna be pissed

Re:There are cons too

[BlueWonder]

Censorship. Ironically enough, Germany has no First Amendment and you are not guaranteed free speech.

While Germany does not have a First Amendment, it does have an "Artikel 5 Absatz 1 Grundgesetz". Here is my attempt to translate it to English:

Everyone has the right to freely state and distribute his opinion in spoken, written or imaged form and to obtain information from publicly available sources without limit. The freedom of the press and the freedom of reporting on radio and TV are granted. There is no censonship.

Germany must have learned some lessons

[CodeWheeney]

This article made me laugh as I thought of the fact that one of the main reasons the allies in WW II were able to decript and read Enigma traffic was that the Nazis were convinced that it was unbreakable. Germany is learning a lesson from history and going with a reviewable protocol and implementation, it would seem. Then again, human factors played an important role in breaking Enigma, and I would figure similar poor use of even modern cryptography could lead folks of an intellect similar to those who broke enigma to break selected PGP, GnuPP traffic.

That also makes me wanna quote Vizzini from the Princess Bride: "Inconceivable". I wonder if the German high command ever had that thought.

Man Encryption -> Nazis -> Princess Bride. I didn't get enough sleep.