Slashdot Mirror
Google May Close Gmail Germany Over Privacy Law
Matt writes "Google is threatening to shut down the German version of its Gmail service if the German Bundestag passes it's new Internet surveillance law. Peter Fleischer, Google's German privacy representative says the new law would be a severe blow against privacy and would go against Google's practice of also offering anonymous e-mail accounts. If the law is passed then starting 2008, any connection data concerning the internet, phone calls (With position data when cell phones are used), SMS etc. of any German citizen will be saved for 6 months, anonymizing services like Tor will be made illegal."
Just when I thought Europe was going to be the last bastion of freedom in the world.
... Germany is going to one-up you if you're not careful.
Congress, look out
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
WTF?
I can walk around San Francisco and find hundreds, if not thousands, of open or misconfigured wireless routers. Anonymous access to anyone with a notebook.
How does germany plan on enforcing this?
GMail Poland excutives were looking rather nervous after this announcement.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Polizei state anyone?
Yeah, Google will do in Germany what it didn't do in China? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google# China (OK, not exactly the same thing but you get the point). I won't bet on it.
What you forget is that such laws are proposed mostly to "fight a war against terrorism".
The existence of this problem, and the stupid idea of fighting terrorism with a war, is mostly the USA's fault.
I wonder if they are going to start requiring their citizens to wear flare as well.
Great We take down one wall and another comes up, why does the government fear computers so much that they must spy on everyone, can't they have a little trust
WulframII - Free Online Mutiplayer 3D Tank Shooting Game
Google does have morals, just as long as the market they are standing up against isn't to big, and they'll get the customers anyway (through their austrian service). I could accept what they did in China because it was a business decision to have a limited presence rather than no presence, but this kind of hypocrity is just crap.
and host the German version on de.gmail.com instead of gmail.de ?
Brazilian ISPs have always had the duty to record and keep everything that's sent by anyone over the internet. If someone feels defamed by anything that can be proved to come from that ISP, the company is held responsible if the author cannot be found. Brazilian judges have always been very, very eager to grant injunctions against any publication of personally derogatory words or images.
This includes books too, a famous example was a few years ago, when a biography of soccer star Garrincha was pulled out of bookstores at the request of his daughters. The reason? It was stated in the book, based on his lovers' declarations, that Garrincha's penis was approximately 27 cm (11 inches) long. This book was later released, after an appeals court decided that saying a man has a large penis is not a derogatory statement.
Its taken the luddite politicians 20 years notice the rise and power of the internet. Virtual will mirror real world as power is rested from the techies into corporate and gorvernments. Privacy will never be mainstream. Although it will still exist for those willing to go the extra mile. Enjoy it while it lasts.
One difference is that in the West, you can pull maneuvers like this and sometimes they actually make a difference. China probably wouldn't have cared much at all if Google had gotten petulant, and it certainly wouldn't have mattered to them whether or not their citizens lost access to something valuable. In Germany, who knows?
And cynical types can always note that China is a much bigger market than Germany.
Tweet, tweet.
Maybe I'm missing something, but this law sounds like a storm in a teacup, and this story sounds like yet another PR exercise on behalf of Google.
Privacy is not the same as anonymity. I have often suggested around here that on-line anonymity may do more harm than good in practice. For the record, that does not mean that I think ISPs should release personal data about their subscribers to just anyone, nor that they should retain such data indefinitely, nor that governments should be able to look up such data on a whim.
But frankly, I suspect that most people who use anonymising techniques on-line do have something to hide, and that something is usually connected to damaging others. There seem to be way, way, way more instances of spammers, phishing expeditions, fraudsters, character assassins and others taking advantage of the relative inability to enforce laws against Internet-based targets — thanks in large part to the relative anonymity you can easily achieve on-line today — than there are examples of genuinely good things like whistle-blowing and free expression under non-free regimes that might legitimately be protected by anonymity. Clearly there is a fine line here between setting dangerous precedents and undermining what might to some people be a vital tool in the defence of liberty, and pragmatically acting to protect lots of people from things that are actually damaging them right now, and I don't for an instant claim that there is a single right answer to this or that I am 100% convinced what I suggest here would always be the way to go.
Incidentally, we already have some similar-sounding laws in the UK, as far as the keeping of records go (under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, primarily) and these haven't led to widespread abuse even under the way-too-controlling Blair administration. There are some things in RIPA that really shouldn't be law, but so far this doesn't seem to be one of them.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
This coming from the company that already stores all search information from all users into a permanent database? This coming from the company that already has software that automatically scans all your emails and stores information about that "for advertising purposes"?
I guess what they're objecting to isn't the storing of such data, since they already do that. It's the idea of having to share that data with the government.
Why bother with the law? Seems to me all you need to do is *let* businesses do the tracking (which of course they're going to want to do, because data mining is especially useful for marketeers), and government just needs to occasionally ask nicely for copies?
Better yet if you've also got a unitary executive to go along with it.
Tweet, tweet.
Stand up and fight Germany, but let China and their ilk off the hook. Glad to see consistency w/ these companies.
Dude, they one of the largest people moving exercises in history with only the most primitive of computers, I think they could handle easily detectable wireless in 2007.
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
6 months ago I used gmail and pandora for all my music and e-mail needs. /.? Linux? ;-(
First they took pandora from us and now gmail. Whats next? digg.com?
Should I sell my PC now, or what? Honestly. Just when I thought my country (germany) is getting a little relaxed in a paranoid world.
Though your point is valid, this is not unique to Hitler. History shows us that almost all Governments will eventually try to control the freedoms of their citizens in increasingly more invasive manners.
Dude, the secret police already do that, in Germany and elsewhere. Haven't you been paying attention to anything recently?
They have something to hide, just like the authors of the Federalist Papers had someting to hide. Once you try to start saying some anonymous speech is ok and some is not you have lost the value of anonymity.
Here's the impression I get from the headline: Google's violating privacy, Germany threatens to pass a law against it, Google would rather shut down than end their nefarious activities. I read the summary, and I find it's not a privacy law, it's a surveillance law. Google's the good guys here!
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." - Bob Dylan
Germany already requires licenses for TV sets and things like baby monitors. And they enforce it. They actually have vans equipped with detection equipment that scan for electromagnetic radiation from these devices, and if you're not on record as having paid the tax their is a knock on your door. Extending this to 802.11 will be trivial.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Ah, the euro-apologists can't resist a nice baseless slam. It's good to see some things never change.
Couldn't Germans just sign up with another countries gmail and then use that? Or is the german government going to force ISPs(which they have a large say in one of the largest ones, Telekom) to block access to gmail? I am an American currently living in Germany and I use my gmail account(which I registered for while I was still a student at Penn State) as my main email address. Would I be affected by this? TFA is pretty light on details.
Monstar L
Could this be an attempt to strike back for this or perhaps this? (EU:Google 2:1)
Or rather a lame attempt to weaken the impact of things like this?
Here the original Spiegel Article(in German, of course).
Information about the draft law and what people can do to prevent it from being passed can be found at the following site:
http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/ (also in German)
What's scary is the range of people that are supposed to get access to the collected information,
it's not just the police but also "Nachrichtendienste" (news agencies!?) and "ausländische Staaten" (other countries, apparently any that ask)
I'm guessing this is caused by some lobby/bribe action of organizations like the RIAA/MPAA.
I can't think of one good reason of why this might be good for anyone,
criminals will just use bot proxies or other means to bypass the tracking/collection and in the end
it will just be the honest people that get f#cked because with general government incompetence
the the data will end up in the criminal's hand's and used for who knows what.
We fought a war against Germany once. While the majority of Germans probably oppose these moves, if the German government attempt to mandate such totalitarianism throughout the EU, I for one am ready to go again.
What has the world come to when corporations are fighting against national governments for freedom? Well done Google.
I would be outraged if this wasn't like the millionth time a government has tried to censor or extort people on the internet.
the internet survives and lives on, despite Germany or anyone else.
This is really an open and shut case, if Google doesn't like Germany they can just block them or vice versa. Too bad for all the people, but they'll find ways.
Google is actually trying to fight for our privacy? Despite the fact that they keep track of all individual users of their search engine, record that information, and give targeted ads to those people?
I couldn't care less if people Godwin me, but Germany has a level of control over Europe today that Hitler only dreamed about in the early 1940s. And I mourn because this time, she has no enemies.
Up to 50 years ago, the world had the good fortune that no system of allied governments, no matter how repressive, had the technology to conquer the world and destroy all dissent; today, every step away from freedom is globalised, and there is no island so remote that it can stand defiant and fight back when it is finally threatened.
So yes, let us rejoice that for now, and probably for the next couple of decades, we shall enjoy an unprecedented level of peace and "tolerance" in Europe and North America. Because it's come at the expense of the growth of a fist and a boot so hard, that when it chooses to stomp, no-one will be able to dodge its path.
After Europe falls to Soviet America, where can we go? Where /can/ we go? Are there still countries left that care about your rights and freedom? Are there still countries who dare to take a stand against this new "Soviet Union"? In other words, where can I go?
They come pre-configured for high security.
Deleted
and saves it ansd send you ads based on your mails and tries to find as much info about you and etc, etc...
I see, it all makes sense now
fuck karma, I like saying the truth better
I'm hiding my full real name. :-)
Actually, and perhaps rather paradoxically, very few of my on-line writings have my real name attached to them. I wrote here a little while ago about how I'd cancelled all my accounts on social networking sites as well.
I have a very clear reason for doing this: in today's culture, posting under my real name gains me nothing and risks a lot. This is, in fact, where I came in. What we should have are real privacy laws, which prevent the kind of arbitrary collection, sharing and mining of personal information that businesses and governments are increasingly using as technology makes it easy. Until we have these, pseudo-anonymity is a somewhat effective defence, but it's only a band-aid for a greater problem.
The other problem is that society hasn't yet learned that you shouldn't trust everything you read on-line and no-one is perfect. In a sensible world, a prospective employer finding a picture of you doing something stupid while you were a student a decade ago wouldn't be a problem, because they'd just think "Oh, well, a lot of us did stupid stuff when we were students". In a sensible world, a hint in a personal blog that you enjoyed chemistry would not result in police visiting your home because someone reported you as a terrorist. In a sensible world, mentioning your employer by name in a blog wouldn't get you fired (or at least, told to close down the blog or you'd be fired). And so it goes. But this is not, yet, a sensible world.
Before we can reach that world, people need to grow up and realise that no-one is perfect. Finding the odd character flaw or past indiscretion is not the best criteria on which to judge another human being. As I've noted before, if I had taken personal offence every time one of my friends did something that hurt another of my friends, then I would long since have run out of friends. And yet, I know that all of my friends are basically decent people, and that it is just an unfortunate reality that sometimes relationships don't work out and people get hurt, so I am very glad to have the friends I do regardless of any isolated incidents that I might have disliked if I'd been on the wrong end of them.
I am optimistic about this, but I think things have to get worse before they get better. With the current generation growing up with social networking sites who are data mining them like crazy, and who have little concept of personal privacy and why it matters, I think a lot of people are going to get screwed over the next 5–10 years. But after a little while, it will become pretty obvious to everyone that this is stupid. People will stop believing every little thing they read about someone, employers will stop vetting people extensively on their Internet footprint because the method will lack credibility, and when citizens/consumers realise how much they're getting screwed I think they will demand privacy laws that prevent the kinds of abuse that are increasingly happening today.
So, until we reach that point some way down the line, when society has grown up enough to understand the value of privacy and the need to respect people's public personas in a world where most people have an Internet presence somewhere, I choose to protect myself from the damage by posting under pseudonyms on "casual" forums like this one. But I would rather live in a world with serious privacy laws and a grown-up society, where I could write my genuine thoughts here and put my real name to them, knowing that I wasn't going to risk being sued for saying something that inadvertently gave the wrong impression. In that world, I wouldn't need anonymity, and I would be happy to stand by what I write here, with my real name attached.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Make Gmail users where 5 point-down triangles colored blue, red, yellow, blue, green?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
USA is a war country. The only way for the president to gain power is to declare a war. A war on drugs, a war on hippies, a war on terrorists, a war on geeks, a war on freedom. Good war or bad, it's what power hungry presidents have to do.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
What the hell, Germany?
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
FYI, I asked my German friend to comment on the topic and at the bottom of the article are his comments:o gles-gmail-has-issues-in-germany
http://www.centernetworks.com/first-flickr-now-go
Germany might become gayer than ever.
the NSDAP won again the elections in Germany?
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
http://news.google.co.nz/index.html?ned=nz&ncl=111 7499403&hl=en&scoring=n"Germany faced an elevated threat of terrorism on Friday because of its involvement in Afghanistan, according to officials who say the risk of an attack here ...." so that's the excuse for this push-through tactics.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
In fact our two main weapons are invasion of the individual's rights, standardized rational thought and an almost fanatical devotion towards becoming a police state (again?)... three, that's three.
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
Is Germany back to its old ways?
I thought that they would have learned from history and changed, and made sure to never do the same mistake again.
STASI is back!
Don't be stupid, this is nothing like the Nazis. As a descendant of Jews who were incarcerated during the Holocaust, I am offended by your suggestion.
At times like this, I am ashamed to be a citizen of an EU country.
Who is John Galt?
Time between article posted containing the word "Germany" in the title and article being Godwined: exactly 5 minutes. Damn troll pack.
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
Matt, please pay attention to the proper use of "it's".
Feeling grammar-nazi-ish today... I wonder if it has anything to do with privacy-threatening laws being passed in Germany?
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
If I could choose between the government and/or police constantly spying on all my online-activities, keeping records, and perhaps whenever they feel like it, just come over and confiscate my computer because that one website I curiously clicked on maybe streamed a song to me without royalities getting paid to the GEMA... and the Great Firewall of Germany(TM), where that won't just happen because said website is blocked anyway, I'd choose...
to migrate to another country.
Gauleiters, same as the last time I expect.
Kevin O'Kane http://www.cs.uni.edu/~okane/
Disclaimer: I am an American, however, I was forced to take European history. Are people in Europe ever required to take American history?
Let's start with your major contention: Basically it means they can push through the EU constitution that was thrown out by voters in 2 of the countries last time, without the pesky annoyances of, oh lets say, the people of the EU [Ed's note: I assume you mean the people of the two dissenting EU contries] voting on the matter...[A constitution that requires] only a majority of countries are needed for things to be agreed upon not unanimous...
An example from US history would be the movement from the Articles of Confederation (which did require unanimous ratification of the Articles and the laws) to the US Constitution (which required a 3/4 ratification for the Constitution and simple majority for the laws). The reason the US Constitution only required 3/4 ratification was to force Rhode Island and Providence Plantation and North Carolina to join the Union (since they were known to oppose it) and leave a one state buffer. The reason why the simple majority system works better, well perhaps I best use a European example: "Poland was a country ruled by a council of 500 barons, all of whom had to agree for anything to happen. This allowed Poland to get ****ed by anyone who could make a simple decision."
Basicailly, the Articles of Conferation were a flop, and there needed to either be one or thirteen states. Similarly, any EU requiring unanimous consent will also fail. History abounds with examples where the needs of building or running a nation mean forcing people into the social contract. There doesn't seem to be any other way for the world to work.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Complaining about "its" vs. "it's"... You must be new here.
I'll go along with David Brin's speculations about the transparent society so far as to see it as the lesser evil, but I suspect the transparent society will be more like Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" than Brin's "Earth".
By the way, I would recommend reading those two books in order of publication. There are a number of parallels between them: Alex Lustig isn't Donald Hogan or Norman House, but I suspect if the three got together they'd discover he's got a lot in common with them.
I very rarely post vote parent up posts, but this is just too important to languish at Score:2.
Our national democracies is being systematically taken over by this mockery of a democratic system and the mainstream press is all but silent on the matter.
The semi-informed Europeans point the finger at the present state on non-democracy in the US and feel superior. The truly informed Europeans are attempting to make the rest realize that we are just a few years behind. The same powers that have almost completely removed any real democracy from the US are hard at work doing the same to the EU.
Please people, wake up and make your voices heard through protests, and through votes before it is too late.
Easy, you are caught with an open wifi, you goto prison. No questions asked.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
*Puts insecure wireless router into gas chamber*
And that helps?
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
And if you truly believe in the free market, you believe that such businesses would come to exist.
Actually, I think in order to believe that business would come to exist, you have to believe in several other things besides markets:
(1) A significant demand among customers (preferably in conditions where they consequences of their choices regarding privacy are clear and aren't to decisions about something more essential)
(2) Either:
(a) That it's possible to make more money off of not selling your customers out than selling them out.
(b) Companies that inherently value privacy over money to be made off of selling the customer out.
If #1's not there in sufficient quantity, obviously a market isn't going to move toward privacy. And if #2a isn't true, then whether or not things move towards privacy has nothing to do with markets and everything to do with #2b: the existence of business owners and officers who value individual privacy so highly they're willing to give up a profit on it.
Right now, it seems that many businesses prefer to operate under conditions very different from my parenthetical qualification for #1. And also that by and large they seem to behave as if #2a isn't true.
I have two theories about why:
I. They're right. #2a isn't true.
II. They're wrong, but the payoff from following #2a is either:
a - distant enough the local maxima is hard to resist
b - far enough outside training and cultural conception that even though it's there, most officers and owners can't see it
c - diffused enough among other returns that it's hard to measure
So, yes, I do believe markets can do a lot of cool things. But, no. I don't think it's safe to say they'll inevitably produce businesses that genuinely value privacy.
Tweet, tweet.
What do you mean, how do they plan on enforcing this? Since when do lawmakers around the world need to worry about this sort of praticalities when passing idiotic internet laws? How could they possibly be expected to? Next thing you'll want them to actually understand the technical issues before making a decision, eh?
And that helps? Yes. It will kill all the bugs.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
it would be flair.
Flare is always related to fire in some way, shape or form.
Flare
-verb (used without object)
1. to burn with an unsteady, swaying flame, as a torch or candle in the wind.
2. to blaze with a sudden burst of flame (often fol. by up): The fire flared up as the paper caught.
3. to start up or burst out in sudden, fierce activity, passion, etc. (often fol. by up or out): Tempers flared at the meeting. Violence flared up in a new section of the city.
4. to shine or glow.
5. to spread gradually outward, as the end of a trumpet, the bottom of a wide skirt, or the sides of a ship.
flair
-noun
1. a natural talent, aptitude, or ability; bent; knack: a flair for writing rhymes.
2. smartness of style, manner, etc.: Their window display has absolutely no flair at all.
3. keen perception or discernment.
4. Hunting. scent; sense of smell.
Linux Zealots: Smarter than Mac Zealots, but still zealots.
You're wasting your time. A college professor who taught freshman English once said, "If someone has reached the age of 18 or older utterly convinced that the possessive form of the pronoun 'it' is formed with an apostrophe, nothing you say or do will ever be able to disabuse them of the notion."
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
So when Germany wants to store data for six months, it's wrong.
When Google wants to store data for 18 months, that's okay.
Riiiiiiiight.
Freedom for criminals? No thanks.
Did people really believe providing the Chinese with uncensored information and not having it blocked by the government was an option?
Gründlichkeit or thoroughness is just so much part of the German character. Back in Scotland you could read the important parts of the Blue Book tax guide in the bookshop and easily identify any new legal tax avoidance strategies. You couldn't do that with the German Tax Books there are about 127 of them. My accountant just photocopies pages out and sticks them in the tax return. You have to pay canal tax but there's no canal and you don't get one either. As for thoroughness, Non-German partners are often very surprised when they clean the entire house from top to bottom only to have their partner point out that they forgot the single cup they drank their post cleaning coffee in which is standing on the immaculate sink - dirty. There is no mention of all the good work, because the concept of balancing good things against negative things (one good thing outweighs loads of bad things) is rather specific to English speakers. German anthropology uses the concept of a linear measure of perfection (or distance from it!) and the streets are so clean you could eat your dinner off them. Well, almost but this is the real reason behind this action, more national character than conspiracy.
I should confess to reading lots of Tabloid newspapers though but I have also read Critique of Pure Reason if that counts for anything curiously neither activity appears to have had any lasting effect, whereas Counterstrike, now that's a whole different kettle of fish...
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
Papieren bitte!
Didn't we hear this before?
...I'm happy that the members of my parliament doesn't even know what Internet is!
has to say I'm so damn sick of this whole crap. Honestly, it sucks so hard to live here, our idiot son of an asshole Secretary of the Interior ("Innenminister" in german) Wolfgang Schäuble demands other, equally perverted, things on a daily basis. In the moment, the best example is his sick idea of a secret online search on hard discs in private computers of so called "suspicious" citizens. I think it's time to get out of Germany as soon as possible, because I'm afraid this whole surveillance might become (and already is, up to a certain degree) pretty dangerous in the near future. Personally, I always thought of Canada as a nice place to life, especially as they dropped those stupid anti-terror-laws, but I consider my English to be far too bad for migrating. Btw, sorry for my poor English!
We need a slashdotter for US president... To outlaw all these bullshit rules, and to help push the drones in the Canadian government in the right directions. (The way our government is formed, you don't elect the Prime Minister, you just elect a representative in your region. So you could like Dr. Jones the liberal, but not agree with the Liberal Party's leader(s).)
:(
But really now. Someone here's got to have taken an hour to read up on politics. Swoop in to a high-tech area (Sillicon Valley anyone?) claim to represent the freedoms of the people, demand censorship be limited (Except in extreme cases like kiddie porn) demand the removal of the DMCA & outlaw DRM.
Now I'd immigrate to the US first thing if I heard that!
But this is just really sad for the Germans...
Jeez, I've neer done this before, but the fellow, while obliquely Godwinning I suppose, was nevertheless making an invaluable point, and does not deserve to be modded flamebait.
People, especially in nerd forums like this one, often assume that the consequences of technologies (esp. communications tech and esp. esp. Internet tech) on enforcement are inherently "pro-little guy" so to speak, when in fact a government with a barely competent staff and a mediocre resource structure can often use very simple tools to bring state power to bear upon its citizens. There have not been any new technologies that I have seen that places a person easily out of the reach of my government, much less any other; I would imagine if such technologies, methods, and/or devices existed, everybody would own one. All the "Internet will set us free" and "the Internet cannot be controlled" is empty rhetoric, as far as I can tell.
As parent pointed out in converse, a government successfully coordinated a multi-national genocide using nothing but punch-card machines. That is, new technologies coupled with the resources of a government are easily bent to police-state purposes.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
The very concept of this scares me. The presidential seal on the podium would suddenly reveal itself to be a cleaverly disquised LCD during a speach and suddenly become a goatse pic. The GNAA posters would wind up as the cabinet, but at least we would finally get Natalie Portman naked and petrified, covered with hot grits.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
A couple people have posted comments to the effect that Google's behavior in Germany and China is inconsistent, with the implication that Google isn't acting on principle, and really just makes its decisions on purely monetary bases.
Google doesn't have email in China either, for precisely the same reasons it's threatening to shut it down in Germany: offering email would effectively require it to give people's email data to the Chinese government, which it thinks is deserving of more protection than search queries.
I know a lot of people disagree with Google's actions, but you at least shouldn't criticize them based on a misconception that they're inconsistent. Google does have privacy standards and is enforcing them consistently in this case.
Can't anybody who doesn't want the German government to read their mail just sign up with gmail.com or yahoo.com?
(Granted, the US government will likely read their mail, but the US government is not likely to be that interested in what Germans do in Germany unless it affects the US.)
Hi folks,
2 6/id/280127/fm/0/SH/0/depot/0/index.html
being the original author of the story mentioned I'm glad to follow the discussion about Google Mail's potential withdrawal from Germany here at Slashdot.org. Two little corrections anyway.
1. The original story was neither published at newlaunches.com not at SPIEGEL (as mentioned at newlaunches). The text originates from the German business weekly WirtschaftsWoche and can be found there - in case someone wants to read it in German: http://www.wiwo.de/pswiwo/fn/ww2/sfn/buildww/id/1
2. Peter Fleischer is "Global privacy Counsel" at Google and not only its german privacy representative.
Best
Thomas
Not at all. It's just the usual "we got something against you in our hand if we should ever need something" crap that's been springing up left and right recently.
How do you want to enforce it? You could drive around and pinpoint open WiFi APs, knock down their door and question them. It's most likely either
a) 30ish person who got the access point from his provider and doesn't know jack about configuring.
b) 13 year old who got it as a birthday gift and doesn't know jack about configuring.
c) Student flat-share (of philosophy students or similar) who don't know jack...
You get the idea.
Now, while you might get brownie points from the yellow press for digging up those long-haired hippy student terrorist communists, they'll tear you apart for the 13 year old and the 30 year old will plaster his provider with very irate calls why they give out insecure WiFi APs, this will hit the press, generally not something our politicians want because they do want "broadband for the masses". First, it's a noncontroversal topic, so you can easily talk about it without fearing backlash (and that would be backlash and one of the few precious uncontroversal topics down the loo), and second our corporations want people to have access to the 'net so they can tell them and sell them crap.
Noooot a good idea to hack that down, I'd say.
So it's not going to be enforced at all. All that will happen is that whenever they have a reason to want into your apartment (like, when they think you might be doing something highly illegal like filesharing), they have a cheap reason to kick down your door or at least get a warrant.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Open up GMail servers in the US for everyone. Do you need a "gmail.de" account instead of a "gmail.com"?
I don't. GMail.com is just fine for me.
I wonder when politicians realize that their power ends at the borders of their country/countries, while the internet pipes don't.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I use gmail.com anyway, not .de.
:P
I wonder if that one'll end up blocked, like flickr in China. Perhaps in the future, I'll have to take a WLAN-equipped notebook around town, looking for an unprotected hotspot, and use some highly encrypted, anonymized tunnel while looking over my shoulder for the Gestapo squads. And all that just to check my email!
After a decade of Nazism and a few decades of half of the country being ruled by
Communists, you would think they would have learned by now. But then too, this is the
same country that banned Wolfenstein 3d because of the swastickas and Nazi imagry,
even though the point of the game was to kill nazis and escape from a nazi compound.
Excuse me, but that is not entirely true -- you're mixing up two different things. Yes, there are vans that can detect certain kinds of EMR but this has nothing to do with the obligatory fee you have to pay for watching (public broadcasting) TV. It's more about locating pirate radio stations or faulty/unlicensed electronic equipment that is interfering with TV reception or other things. That the GEZ, the agency which collects the TV/radio fee, has TV-detection equipment, too, is an urban myth. With regard to the grandparent: I guess the government could easily detect wifi routers; but given the sheer number that doesn't sound practical. I guess in the end it will be similar to the current situation: you can have an open access point but you are made legally responsible for any abuse that is done via your internet connection. Which is the reason why the number of open APs is drastically smaller than in the US.
"Do you mind that your daghter is watched every step to and from school?"
Because that's what "surveillance" means. And if you think this is not a problem, the people watching will not be highly paid and will not have to pass stringent background checks (or if they are, these will end when it turns out to be expensive). So will someone be watching vigilantly because they are serving the public interest or because they fancy watching whatever the system shows them? Which includes your little daughter going to school, where she stops what times she normally goes and who with.
Scared now?
How about we export President Bush over to Germany? Sounds like he'd fit right in.
Germany has still many odd interactions with the post-WW2 world. I don't live in Germany, but I'm of German descent (3rd generation) and as such now and then either read or hear about what's going on "over there", and rarely it's something I like. For instance, did you know that home-schooling your kids in Germany can cause you to go to jail, lose parenting rights, and put your kids into an orphanage? Not only that, but until Hitler (yes, he!) prohibited it in the 1930's, home-schooling was allowed. So, modern-day "we censor books" Germany not only holds old nazi laws valid, but also have no shame on actually destroying real people lives for violating them. How can this be?!?
Germany is a schizophrenic country. Nazism shattered its collective mind beyond recognition, causing a profound cognitive dissonance to develop, and no cure is on sight. Unfortunately we're still going to see lots of BS coming from there...
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Nah...
The way thins are going Iran and maybe some similar countries will be the new free world. Atleast they're going in the right direction
All the people in Europe fighting for the independence of their different statelets are shooting themselves in the foot.
The reality of the world today is that big blocks are emerging. We have already well defined China and India, then the US that increase it sphere of influence greatly with NAFTA (and if it wasn't for their idiotic reluctance, we would have free movement of people between Mexico, Canada and the US as propossed by Mexico recently), we also have ASEAN (300 million souls more less), MERCOSUR in South America, etc.
In Europe we have derided people in small countries "fighting for their independence" (like Poland, and sorry, 50 million people compared against any of the block mentioned, is small, same goes for the UK) failing that "independence" in today's world is synonymous with irrelevance and dependency.
The longer European countries take to realize this and embrace a proper European state, the later they will arrive to the negotiating table with the other power blocks forming around the world. This desire to remain small and irrelevant is truly disturbing.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
US history is an appendage of European one.
The US owes its existence to the wants, needs, and conflicts between European powers and European settlers, derives its institutions from the ones tried in Europe, adopts most European languages at its own (English, Spanish being the 2 most important) and as far as the 20th century was involved in 2 wars started in Europe that shaped the rest of the world.
The US also used economic systems first used and developed in Europe (capitalism, slavery).
There are of course things that are uniquely USian, but nobody can deny than the US is firmly in the thread of European history, unlike places like China, India or North Africa and West Asia which have historical traditions completely different.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
.... that allowing to talk apologists of mas murderers advances nobody's freedom.
It is the political equivalent of people claiming the Earth is flat, something completely unsustainable, but when it comes to Nazi apologism the action is also perverse and I would add evil, which is a word I don't use lightly.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Good. Hit the elected bastards right where it hurts, in their election balls.
It works. See the US two weeks ago re: immigration "reform". Or the US 15 years ago re: nationalization of health care.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
.... there is a fundamental difference between being silly and being dangerous.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You forgot to add "poor and powerless" to number 1.
Also in my original comment I did not mention that democracy has to be abolished.
The problem is that some people in Europe confuse petty regionalism with freedom, forgetting that democracy is about compromises.
If Europeans want to be bit players in world affairs the other geopolitical regions are not going to stop you falling on your own sword.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
And there is a fundamental difference there.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.