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.

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...

[__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...

[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.