Slashdot Mirror
Germany Plans To Email Trojans
speardane sends us word of a proposal in the German legislature to make it legal for that government to email spyware to terror suspects. The action comes in response to a court denying prosecutors' requests to break into suspects' computers over the Internet. The German chancellor supports the measure despite considerable outcry from political opponents and rights groups.
More to the point, would it be illegal to reverse-engineer the spyware and send the guvmint all sorts of interesting information (that it would presume to be the spyware reporting back in?)
After all, Big Brother deserves the very best, right?
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
...terror suspects will know they are being investigated.
If I were a terrorist, or really any kind of nefarious criminal (because you just know there are foolish people salivating about doing the same to any criminal suspects) I would welcome this decision. If was a bad guy and I was worried that 'they' were on to me, receiving this trojan would be proof positive.
And then I would take the opportunity to feed false information back to the people who sent me the trojan. Hooo boy, what a great way to make trouble for people I don't like, better than falsely reporting them to the IRS.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Next they will just email their super duper virus to child porn operators, then tax evaders, then jay walkers. As the DMCA and the Patriot Act have taught us, if it can be abused, it will. It's just human nature, or the nature of people who choose to work for the man, anyway.
yes. there was a story net a few says ago where a court ordered that the guy couldn't use anything other than windows because their monitering software only worked on it,
There is a huge difference. In the case you're referring to, the man was already convicted of a crime. A result of conviction is often a loss of certain liberties and rights. As a condition of his parole (which can be quite arbitrary on the part of the state) he can continue to use a computer provided it is with the monitoring software running - this is only possible with Windows. It's difficult to make a case that will stand up that the conditions are particularly onerous or truly cruel and unusual.
On the other hand, this article is about a case where a government wants to send spy software to suspected criminals in the homes they can get useful information for a prosecution. I'm not familiar with German law, but if this were the US, it's probably okay for the government to do this. There are similar tactics that have not been thrown out, such as mailing a "you won a prize" envelope to a suspected murderer/rapist - which he then licked, leaving his DNA, and returned - thus giving the probable cause for an arrest and prosecution).
The government can't yet compel someone to give up their DNA and I suspect that a similar logic would be applied to a person's choice of computer software - the government can't compel you to use a certain kind of software just to make it convenient to gather data to be used against you. We are all presumed innocent and they have to have probable cause merely to investigate. To actually compel you to give up rights (requiring you to run specific software) you need to have a conviction... or a law that applies to all of us.