Germany Implements Sweeping Data Retention Policies

G'Quann writes "Starting next year, all communication providers in Germany will have to store all connection data for six months. This includes not only phone calls but also IP addresses and e-mail headers. There had been a lot of protest against the new law, but it was ignored by the government. Quoting: 'The content of the communications is not stored. The bill had been heavily criticized. Privacy [advocates] had organized demonstrations against the bill in all major German cities at the beginning of this week. In October there had already been a large demonstration with thousands of participants in Germany's capital Berlin. All opposition parties voted against the bill. Several members of the opposition and several hundred private protesters announced a constitutional complaint.'"

Comments

At least they saw it coming

[KingSkippus]

Before we in the U.S. get to patting ourselves on the back for not being this bad, consider the story just two posts down that discusses how this is probably already being done here with no one's knowledge or consent. I say "probably" because no one really knows. No laws passed, no protests staged (hard to protest something you don't even know about), just government silently doing whatever it wants after slapping a "national security" label on it.

It's not right in Germany, and it's not right here. The difference is that at least in Germany, this type of gross invasion of privacy happened on the public record and they can react and do something about it now.

Of course, we in the U.S. can do something about it too, but most people won't get worked up over what government might be doing without it being proven true, and our government is mercilessly exploiting that fact right now by keeping everything secret and implying that anyone who thinks otherwise is some kind of kooky conspiracy theorist (while they spy on them to make sure they don't get too far out of line).

Re:At least they saw it coming

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm.
 
The people who see this coming are a minority. I don't think Germany is special in this way. Governments all over the world are doing this quitely and slowly, so almost nobody will notice the difference or will do anything, because the difference is so small.
 
Germany just introduced fingerprints in their id cards. Very few people think that this is a bad idea.
 
20 (maybe less) years and we are in 1984.

Re:At least they saw it coming

[terraformer]

Dude, employees coming to congress and saying this is happening is not equivalent to some nut bag who believes in space aliens giving him an anal probe. The evidence is there for the taking, but it is locked up behind national security claims that no one seems to have the balls to break open and shine the light of day on to see if they are valid. So excuse folks who believe that trust but verify is not a bad way of approaching matters with the government. And oh, black helicopters are your side's boogey man, not his...

Re:At least they saw it coming

[xENoLocO]

You'd probably get pretty pissed if you heard about the patriot act. ;)

Re:At least they saw it coming

[KingSkippus]

Dude, employees coming to congress and saying this is happening is not equivalent to some nut bag who believes in space aliens giving him an anal probe.

When did I say it was?

I'm referring to things such as the practice of extraordinary rendition, torture by waterboarding, silently monitoring all Internet traffic, etc. Stuff that the administration in charge keeps waving their hand at us and telling us, "There's nothing to worry about."

There's an unprecedented level of government secrecy in the U.S. now, secrecy about stuff that has little or nothing to do with national security. Well, secrecy except when it comes to disclosing the names of CIA personnel who happen to be involved with your political enemies. That's what makes me so nervous, it's secrecy for political reasons, not secrecy for security reasons.

It's kind of ironic that all of this is done in the name of protecting me from terrorists. I'm more afraid of my own government today than I've ever been of terrorists. And frankly, I feel that the government that has spent so much time, money, and effort, breaking laws whenever convenient, to protect me from terrorism has made us more vulnerable than ever.

Re:At least they saw it coming

[owlnation]

The difference is that at least in Germany, this type of gross invasion of privacy happened on the public record and they can react and do something about it now.

Yeah. That's the thing. This is happening everywhere in western "democracies". The problem is... where totalitarian dictatorships went wrong in the past, is that they try and shut people up. That causes trouble. There's really no need to to quieten and remove dissidents. No-one really cares.

People get all het up about changes to Facebook, what's on Reality TV, the price of gas, road traffic enforcement -- but stuff like this, stuff that really matters. Meh, forget it, nobody cares...

Are people already brainwashed? It's really impossible to imagine The American / French / Russian / etc revolution happening now. What happened? Seriously, how did this happen?

Re:At least they saw it coming

[terraformer]

I was not (and did not) reply to your post. I was replying to the troll in between your post and mine. Read it and what I said in my original post will make a lot more sense to you.

Re:At least they saw it coming

[goldspider]

I say "probably" because no one really knows. No laws passed, no protests staged (hard to protest something you don't even know about), just government silently doing whatever it wants after slapping a "national security" label on it.

In other words, "groundless speculation."

The Bush administration doesn't have a really good record of keeping such programs under wrap. Why would this be any different?

Re:At least they saw it coming

[ArcherB]

I see you were modded (-1 Truth)

Re:At least they saw it coming

[aeschenkarnos]

but most people won't get worked up over what government might be doing without it being proven true

Most people won't get worked up over what government might be doing even with it being proven true. That's been shown many times already.

Re:At least they saw it coming

[Anonymous Coward]

20 (maybe less) years and we are in 1984.

Im confused, its 2007 isn't it?

Re:At least they saw it coming

[KingSkippus]

Ah, you're right, it does make more sense now. I was wondering how you got aliens out of my post.

Nice reply.

Heh, Bushbots. I'll have to remember that one.

Re:At least they saw it coming

[Anonymous Coward]

It's mostly Rupert Murdoch's fault. People believe stuff they see, especially the older generation. Having a TV in every home is basically mind control.

Re:At least they saw it coming

[jonfr]

First they ban security sweeps and security checks on software, now then allow spying on the public. I think someone is too big of a fan of the U.S. Fire the asshole that did allow this laws going to congress.

On a other note, Iceland has similar laws already. We have been trying to fire the asshole how did make the for years now. With no luck sadly.

Re:At least they saw it coming

[cddp]

Sadly, out of all the comments here, he's the only one who got it right. This is NOTHING like what we're seeing here in the US. There are quite a few important differences: - This is a public law that has been voted on by the legislature (UNLIKE anything we've seen here). - They are not saving the actual content, but just the connection data (eg. A talked with B). - The government is not the one who's saving this data. Individual providers are now required to keep the data for 6 months. That certainly limits the potential for abuse and it's different than the NSA installing 'secret' rooms in Telco buildings. - A warrant is still necessary to get access to the data. In short, this seems like a reasonable step to take. Unlike with the illegal wiretapping and all sorts of other clearly unconstitutional things we've seen around here, these measures only require providers to keep this data for 6 months. NOTHING else.

Re:At least they saw it coming

[Opportunist]

If it's any consolation for you, most people in Germany don't get worked up over it either.

Re:At least they saw it coming

[Opportunist]

Being more afraid of government abusing its power against its people than from terrorists who may or may not attack you doesn't mean you support terrorists.

I'm also more afraid of a government using its power to eliminate my freedoms than of terrorists using violence to achive the same goal. Simply because of statistical probability of either happening and the relative likelyness of success.

What can a terrorist do? He can strike a certain target to limited damage. It can be a serious blow like what happened at 9/11, but this hardly affected the whole country directly. What affected the whole country were the actions taken by the government as a response to it.

So yes, I'm more afraid of an abusive government. It has far more effective means on its hands to have a negative effect on my life than any terrorist could have.

Re:At least they saw it coming

[Opportunist]

Most revolutions come in times of despair. When you look at the French and the Russian revolution, both were in the end caused by people having the alternative of either starving to death or overthrowing the government. I'm not so sure about the American revolt. Maybe it was the only one that wasn't caused by utter desperation.

Now, the US economy is maybe moving downwards currently, but we're far from the point of starvation and economic desaster. Everyone's fed, everyone's entertained. That's how the Roman Empire survived even long after it was clear that it will crumble.

Also, people are more than ever concerned with their life and wellbeing. We want to live, and we want to live long. We kinda expect to reach the age of 70. We expect to have a cure for pretty much everything. We're deadly afraid of the avian flu even though the number of victims is insignificant (compare it to diseases people were subjected to earlier, like the plague, dysentery, smallpox and so on), and we're evenly afraid of terrorist attacks even though the chance to die from it is near zero as well.

We're just not used to things people had to deal with on a daily base in earlier times. We don't expect to die at work from something falling down or being exposed to hazards. We have safety regulations for that and we observe them, so we don't die at work. We don't expect to die from some disease, medicine has almost everything that was lethal until a century ago under control, we don't expect our buildings to collapse on top of us or that some tool we use blows up in our face, we got building codes and safety rules in place to keep this from happening.

That was normal until a century or two ago. That was everyday life. Life was dangerous and if you didn't watch out you died. Simple as that.

We don't die today anymore from such accidents, we don't die from strange diseases. Our life is safe and sane. And that's how we want it.

Now, a revolution doesn't fit into this safe lifestyle. We're already pissing our pants if we can't afford an insurance for every bit of our life, heaven forbid something actually happens! We're used to a very predictable and safe life. Revolutions don't fit in there.

Re:At least they saw it coming

[eggnoglatte]

Well, last time I checked -23 is less than 20, so the GP is right ;-)

20 (maybe less) years and we are in 1984.

Im confused, its 2007 isn't it?

Re:At least they saw it coming

[Z00L00K]

And it's not even effective.

The way this is intended to work is that the traffic captured goes unencrypted. As soon as SMTPS, IMAPS and possibly POP3S is used all this effort is just a waste of resources because the mail headers will also be encrypted. Same goes for HTTPS.

Of course it's possible to do a man in the middle attack from the government on this, but it will be a waste of effort and unless the traffic is restricted to always going through government approved servers and proxies it will be a waste of resources trying to track offenders. Personally I started SMTPS/IMAPS a good time ago - not really from being worried about the "big brother" issue but to avoid exposing passwords on the net. The "big brother" lockout is just a side-effect in this case.

Anyway - when it comes to encrypted traffic it is only possible to see between which client and server that there have been traffic of any kind, and nothing else. If by communicating any bad guys are using a web chat on a public forum using HTTPS combined with steganography

it will take a lot of resources to figure out who is communicating with who...

Re:At least they saw it coming

[nx]

You're right about governments all over the world doing this. But they're unfortunately not very slow. As a consequence of an EU directive, all member states are required to pass data retention laws. Six months is, iirc, the minimum mandatory time to retain the data. In Sweden, a recently published inquiry on the matter suggested that data be retained twelve months.

Perhaps most insidiously of all, the inquiry also suggested the directive be implemented in the form of an ordinance (instead of a law), which has the effect that prime minister and cabinet can change the details of regulation at will, thus bypassing parliament. To be even more alarmist for a second: this means that they can change the minimum retention time to several years and start retaining the content of traffic, as well.

It's also wildly ineffective as a means of tracking email traffic, since it only applies to Swedish-based email providers. If you're using hotmail or gmail, you're safe. Paired with the recommendation for ordinance, this may lead some to believe (but not me, surely) it's not about organized crime and terrorism at all, but rather a particularly evil way to pass anti-piracy measures.

Re:At least they saw it coming

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, because email headers are not 'content'. Hmm...

Re:At least they saw it coming

[Lennie]

I'm sorry, but the Subject is in the headers and so is the thread-information (repling on other e-mail by so and so).

I would call it content.

Re:At least they saw it coming

[Lennie]

Because a lot of people don't know what it means to them.

They don't understand the implications.

Re:At least they saw it coming

[Lennie]

In Germany all your protocol encryption is not going to help.

It's the provider handling your e-mail that will save it, it's not 'read' in transit. The provider has access to the unencrypted data.

As long as you don't encrypt the e-mail it self.

Re:At least they saw it coming

[Gamasta]

I think you already answered your own question: western society has only one solid policy which was pushed over the last 30 years: growth. All our problems will be solved with more growth. Attached to it comes consumerism. Lots of people, especially in large cities, have no interest whatsoever in their neighbors and their community.

Whereas people in the past would debate publicly, people now happily go about buying shit to craft their identities (which is what marketing is all about).

If we don't teach children some values, the values die.

Growth Fetish by Clive Hamilton discusses this problem.

Re:At least they saw it coming

[Z00L00K]

Unless the provider is locates in some other country.

Re:At least they saw it coming

[maxwell demon]

Well, just add to every email the header

X-Terrorist: No

and you should be safe. :-)

Re:At least they saw it coming

[Anonymous Coward]

As soon as SMTPS, IMAPS and possibly POP3S is used all this effort is just a waste of resources because the mail headers will also be encrypted. Same goes for HTTPS.

That doesn't help. The encryption is only used between the client and the server: what happens to your mail once it arrives at the mail server is out of your control. The server has decrypted the data when it received it; if it didn't, it couldn't read & write the headers. There is no reason the server couldn't dump a copy of your mail headers to a file for storage. It could also relay your mail onto another SMTP server using a non-encrypted channel.

The same goes for POP3S & IMAPS: the encryption only exists between the server and the client. You have no control over what the server does, and the mail may have reached the server via. a non-encrypted channel.

Using SSL can help prevent some man in the middle type attacks but when it's applied to an inherently store & forward protocol such as SMTP it's largely pointless.

Re:At least they saw it coming

[vertinox]

The problem is... where totalitarian dictatorships went wrong in the past, is that they try and shut people up. That causes trouble. There's really no need to to quieten and remove dissidents. No-one really cares.

Actually, during the cultural revolution in China this technique was used for a bit. Basically, they let people to openly criticize the government and even encouraged it. The went around and said "See! We are democratic! We let people complain about the government!"

Later, they thought it was a bad idea and used all the open criticism to determine who was loyal or not and when back to the old way of not allowing criticism at all.

I believe if used correctly, allowing dissent could be used to prove legitimacy of a dictatorship or plutocracy. The powers that be could say "Hey! Look at this guy who complains about us! That means we are a democracy! A dictatorship would never allow someone to complain. Never mind the fact we don't have free and fair elections because we choose the candidates for the people!"

Re:At least they saw it coming

[quantic_oscillation7]

the tv is the problem.... it's a bunch of lies all day, everywhere, in USA, Europe... why is that we never heard about the horror caused in Iraq and other countries because of depleted uranium? why they don't tell us about what the US government have been doing for the last 50 years in countries like chile, nicaragua, brasil, east timor, indonesia etc etc and all with the help of the british?

Re:At least they saw it coming

[Anonymous Coward]

No, fingerprints (and before a RFID chip) were introduced in passports. ID cards have neither a chip or fingerprints for now.

Re:At least they saw it coming

[Cairnarvon]

The sad part is that you probably aren't even trolling, but seriously believe that if our government is anything but totalitarian the country really will turn Islamist (or that the US really is a better place to live than anywhere the GP could emigrate to).
Enjoy your Kool-Aid.

Re:At least they saw it coming

[Opportunist]

Yes, and our governments do their best to keep it at that. Everyone should use the internet, but nobody should understand it. Another reason why we'll never see any personal responsibility for keeping your computers safe and malware free.

Re:At least they saw it coming

[Anonymuous Coward]

go learn how SMTP works.

The addresses in the 'From:' and 'To:' headers don't have to be the
same as the ones in the 'envelope' (the ones used in the 'MAIL FROM'
and 'RCPT TO' SMTP commands).

Re:At least they saw it coming

[DerWulf]

Being from germany my perspective is different: Your government does something which is clearly illegal. Mine does the same thing legally. This means evidence from it will be court admissible and there is almost no way to stop this except for appealing to the consitutional court. Since the the german consitution was drawn up at the high point of stateism it doesn't restrict law makers a whole lot though. Once you get over the fact that governments are basically evil it becomes preferable if they break their own rules instead of having to power to make most all rules they want.

Re:At least they saw it coming

[dryeo]

Most revolutions come in times of despair. When you look at the French and the Russian revolution, both were in the end caused by people having the alternative of either starving to death or overthrowing the government. I'm not so sure about the American revolt. Maybe it was the only one that wasn't caused by utter desperation.

The American revolution wasn't really a revolution but more a war of secession. The Americans did not want to kill England's ruling class, just wanted to get out from under their thumb. Quite different from the French or Russian revolutions.

Re:At least they saw it coming

[Opportunist]

Quite true. But why? More specifically, why the British colonies in North America? Why not India or all the other colonies England had?

Another thing I wonder. If Jefferson or Washington could look back and see what the US are like, would they be proud or disappointed? Happy or sad?

Re:At least they saw it coming

[dryeo]

Well the British colonies in North America (and Australia) were basically made up of British people who were already used to a fair amount of democracy for the time. Parliament in England had quite a bit of power compared to the crown unlike most other European countries. Most other colonies were mostly made up of their native people ie India consisted of people who had been living there for many generations without any traditions of democracy.
Also a lot of the motivation for war of independence was economic. American business was at a severe disadvantage due to English corporations having government mandated monopolies in many areas. A good example was the Boston tea party which was led by a tea importer who was unfairly taxed compared to the English competition.
Of course being a frontier area people were used to quite a bit of independence and freedom and this was used to motivate the common people to support the war.
Lots of people did disagree with the war and were quite discriminated at the time and many moved to Canada which was one reason that Canada stayed loyal to the crown.
I'm not sure how Washington would feel about present conditions but I'm pretty sure Jefferson would freak. Jefferson really did believe in freedom and I believe he actually wrote that revolutions had to happen regularly to avoid the pitfalls that come from governments that have been in power to long.
Of course nowadays Jefferson would just be labeled a conspiracy theorist and ignored.

Re:At least they saw it coming

[Lennie]

Only one of the two (or even more) providers involved needs to be in Germany.

If I'm not mistaken they've already passed an anti-anonimity law,

And I wouldn't be surprised if they are going to ban the use of some encryption protocols next.

Fascism Anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is fascism.

Re:Fascism Anyone?

[wattrlz]

No, this is a state sponsored invasion of privacy of orwellian scope. Fascism is an authoritarian system of government involving a dictator and heavy on the censorship and public executions.

Re:Fascism Anyone?

[geekoid]

Please make a better attempt at understanding '1984'.

Re:Fascism Anyone?

[trolltalk.com]

> > "This is fascism."

> "No, this is a state sponsored invasion of privacy of orwellian scope."

No, this is a signal to invest in hard drive and tape storage manufacturers and distributors! To teh MOON!

Re:Fascism Anyone?

[Chabil Ha']

Truly. The real thesis of 1984 is not the constant supervision of the people, but the twisting of thought by language. The concept of Newspeak is quite interesting because it erodes people's perceptions of something that is intrinsically bad, but twists it to seem, if not completely opposite, but neutral to the communication at hand.

The constant vigilance of Big Brother was only to ensure that those who even hinted at seeing past Newspeak and the overall deception were properly dealt with.

Re:Fascism Anyone?

[deimtee]

Mod parent DoublePlusGood.

Re:Fascism Anyone?

[Cheesey]

You can see a present day example of Newspeak in the redefinition of words such as "liberal". In this topic, there is at least one example of someone using the new definition. It's quite amazing (1) how that word has been redefined to mean something bad, and (2) how many people have bought into the redefinition by using it. That's the power of television, I guess.

Re:Fascism Anyone?

[spikedvodka]

Truly. The real thesis of 1984 is not the constant supervision of the people, but the twisting of thought by language. The concept of Newspeak is quite interesting because it erodes people's perceptions of something that is intrinsically bad, but twists it to seem, if not completely opposite, but neutral to the communication at hand.

The constant vigilance of Big Brother was only to ensure that those who even hinted at seeing past Newspeak and the overall deception were properly dealt with. Sadly, we're already beginning to see this with English, but they're being far more subtle about it than were the engsoc's in 1984.
they're not trying to create a separate language, rather they're just starting to use existing words differently.

as an example: A bumper Sticker I saw the other day "My son is an Iraq Freedom Fighter" with a US Army Logo. "Freedom fighter" is what is sometimes used by the "Insurgants" as they are fighting to free their country from the ocupying force.

Re:Fascism Anyone?

[wattrlz]

Please make plusgood attempt understanding GP. The use of the word, "scope" was supposed to indicate that the invasion was on the same scale as in the novel, not of the same purpose. Excelent demonstration of thesis, however.

First, best solution to this....

[GeneralEmergency]

&nbsp:

One Word:

Crapflood.

Re:First, best solution to this....

[TheSpoom]

The thing about a crapflood is, if they were smart, they would simply arrest and detain anyone and everyone doing it in the early stages, and scare them out of continuing.

Defeat it by..

[ackthpt]

Flood the internet with grabage

Oh, wait, spammers, worms and bots are already doing this.

Re:Defeat it by..

[Anonymous Coward]

Article talks about "IP addresses and e-mail headers", so I propose that anyone emailing Germany include a special "X-Nazis-Archive-This: Ja, Mein Führer!" header.

Spoofing?

[corsec67]

What if you use an exploit that takes only 1 packet, and spoof the IP addresses? If they try and trace the "hacking" back to one of these IPs, do they get into serious trouble since "of course it is you"?

Re:Spoofing?

[wizardforce]

why bother spoofing an IP from your own machine when there's a nice botnet called storm that could in principle, do the work for you?

Germany is officially off my list

[jhfry]

... of countries to escape to when things continue to get worse here in the US!

Maybe somewhere in the Swiss Alps?

Re:Germany is officially off my list

[What the Frag]

> Maybe somewhere in the Swiss Alps?

As being German: Definitely yes. Island may be an other option to consider

If the current politics remain, Germany is going to be a police and surveillance state in near future...

Re:Germany is officially off my list

[Anonymous Coward]

I won't recommend that. Since the *right* party is trying to create some anti terror laws there could be the possibilty that such a law could be created here too.

There is a possibility that the traffic is already monitored with a facility similar to this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onyx_(interception_system)

Re:Germany is officially off my list

[click2005]

The worst thing is that Germany was the best country in Privacy International's recent report.
http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd%5B347%5D=x-347-545223/

Re:Germany is officially off my list

[click2005]

Damn. Slashdot borked the URL.

HavenCo

[Lumenary7204]

Places like HavenCo are looking better all the time...

I almost posted this in the AT&T spying commen

[sneakyimp]

but it seemed marginally more appropriate here:

In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist;
And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist;
And then they came for the Jews, And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew;
And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up."
        - Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892-1984)

IP addresses?

[Kjella]

Yeah, sure. Whatever. If you're on a P2P network, or even just downloading a linux distro you're probably connected to hundreds of ips which have absolutely nothing with you to do. Good luck on mining that unmanagable mess.

Am I the only one who doesn't care?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wondering ...

Re:Am I the only one who doesn't care?

[wattrlz]

The quote at the bottom of the page says:
The road to ruin is always in good repair, and the travellers pay the expense of it. -- Josh Billings
Eerily appropriate?

Re:Am I the only one who doesn't care?

[nautsch]

you will care, when you have to login to the outside of your house. And when it will be tracked where you go. ... ALWAYS!

Re:I almost posted this in the AT&T spying com

[Tackhead]

On the Internet, they came first for Zimmerman and PGP, and I didn't speak up because nobody could figure out how to integrate it into an email client anyway;
And then they came for the warez d00dz, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a pirate;
And then they came for Napster, and I didn't speak up because I had .torrents;
And then they came for my traffic, and by that time Request timed out.

R.I.P secrecy of telecommunications 1949-2007.

[Joruus]

As of now most people in Germany dont even know what happened today.
The Mainstream Media totally scrapped that Subject and whats best, alot of the Politicans dont know it either.

But at least there is a bit hope, nearly 10000 people fined a complaint of unconstitutionality.

Re:R.I.P secrecy of telecommunications 1949-2007.

[TeraCo]

Secrecy of telecommunications? Are you telling me when Germans got their phone lines hooked up in say.. 1970.. they didn't need to provide billing details? Your 'secrecy of telecommuncations' that you've been prizing is nothing more than 'monitoring technology' lapsing behind communications technology (which it's only done for about the last 10-15 years or so in any case). It was always naive to think that 'the law' wasn't going to catch up.

PS: It's not 'anti-terror' lobbyists who are driving this legislation, it's commercial all the way baby. (Regardless of the way they spin it.)

History

[iknownuttin]

If the current politics remain, Germany is going to be a police and surveillance state in near future...

You would think that the German people would look back on their own history and say "Never again!"

Re:History

[EntropyXP]

You would think that the German people would look back on their own history and say "Never again!"

If America did that with the Japanese Concentration camps then maybe we wouldn't have Guantanamo. Someone posted above about how it "may" be that the US Government is already doing this (except in greater detail) but they are doing so in secret.

So my question is; what's worse? Being led to fascism secretly or openly?

*This comment will hurt my karma*

Re:History

[What the Frag]

> You would think that the German people would look back on their own history and say "Never again!"

You'll laugh, well maybe: I really don't think so.

I believe the majority of people wouldn't notice this until it's too late. People are beein threatened by something like terrorists (we havn't had a terrorist attack yet but according to some politicians, there is a **IMMENSE DANGER OF TERRORIST ATTACK HERE!!**), just to make an example. The problem is: Most people really believe that.

Situations like that have been written in history a lot of times. Not just in Germany, but last incident like that in Germany was not that far away.

Well I really think there is only one option to wake them up: hurt them. They must feel the pain to notice that something is wrong.
And believe me, at the time they do - it will be too late.

Re:History

[JackieBrown]

I doubt it. I bet the opposite.

Re:History

[KDR_11k]

I just respond to that with "so when will the Reichstag burn again?"

Though I guess with the number of muslims around and the private media doing their best to instill paranoia it's easy to sell people an "anti-terror" package they don't need. Maybe I should start a business of anti-terrorist rocks...

Re:History

[muuh-gnu]

The majority of the Germans right now simply does not know what their goverment does. The percentage of privacy aware people is miniscule and mostly active on the net. Yes, there were demonstrations, and about 10000 people took part, but those 10000 were divided on whole 40 (!) cities, so there in average there were only 200-300 demonstrants per city. Not actually enough to make the public aware of the imminent loss of their privacy rights. TV channels were mostly not present at the demos because nobody from the demo organisators cared to inform them soon enough to appear there, or the 200-300 people were not considered important enough to report about.

The German people at large simply do not realize that their current politicians, although not openly sliding back into nazism, are paving the way for future Hitlers or Honeckers, by suggesting and finally implementing control and surveillance laws those two dictators from the past have probably been dreaming of. As I see this, the Germans do not much choice at selections, since the two largest political parties to tightly cooperate on spitting harsh surveillance laws on a monthly basis. Its like in the us, you can either vote for either the reps or the democrats, but cant prevent the DMCA. The Germans have the problem that they, as a people, are simply not keen enough on protesting and fighting for their rights so every now and then, a generation of nazi or nazi-like politicians arises, and just takes over the complete state/police/surveillance/propaganda/military mechanisms, knowing that the Germans as a people will be scared and not organized enough to protest or challenge the state and the goverment.

I personally do not see a way out of this. It just seems to be a part of the German mentality not to challenge the goverment beyond a certain point, so even everybody wants "Never again!", their system and mentality does not have the necessary mechanisms to protect them from their own goverment and make really really sure "Never again!" will stay.

Re:History

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, this wasn't decided by "people". It was decided by a few hundred politicians. Pretty much all experts objected. Saying "Never again!" is nice but get real and realize you can't stop anyone with that. The Nazi terror wasn't over either until the alliance's intervention.

Re:History

[KnuthKonrad]

The Germans have the problem that they, as a people, are simply not keen enough on protesting and fighting for their rights [...]

I call this bullshit! Last week the SPD (social democrats) proposed to introduce a general speed limit of 130 km/h on our Autbahns. You should have heard the embarrassment everywhere. You know, we only protest when it's, like speed limit, purity law for our beer, an important issues.

Disturbing fact: watched a talk show last week dealing about the speed limit. One participant, member of the CSU (conservatives) rejected that proposal from the social democrats, because - now, listen closely - "the speed limit would interfere too much with personal freedom". Go figure ...

Blackmail material.

[Irvu]

In the early days (first 30 years) of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover made heavy use of his "special investigators" to gather dirt on members of congress, the President, and probably parts of the judiciary. This blackmail material was carefully saved for use to protect both himself and advance his power. He also used this against other such noteable figures as Martin Luther King whom he blackmailed with secretly recorded audio of his marital infidelity. Ironically some people regard this as King's fault not Hoover's. It also set the precedent for branches of the government spying on one-another.

The simple fact of the matter is that once you give someone the ability to spy on you they will use it, for themselves. This story and the one two posts down about the NSA make perfect sense. The best way to keep yourself and your party on top is to have all the information, all the secrets that you can about your opponents. That way anyone who might challenge your power could be cowed by threats to expose their, or their childrens' embarrassing secrets.

Quite some time ago Gonzales announced that the Justice Department would begin extensive investigations into the world of Pornography, legal pornography. He candidly admitted that they were not breaking the law nor did he expect to find that Playboy was in violation of some statute. He only said that he wanted to keep track of 'them'.

Forget finding criminals, the Mafia isn't real. It's all always about power. You think Bin Laden and Mullah Muhammed Omar are dumb enough to be googling "Bomb" no they're using trusted couriers and decentralized structures that don't rely on the use of easily traced e-mails. It's all of us and our elected representatives who are the target here.

Re:Blackmail material.

[couchslug]

"Forget finding criminals, the Mafia isn't real."

Convince Italy and I'll agree with that statement. :)

Re:Blackmail material.

[iamacat]

He also used this against other such noteable figures as Martin Luther King whom he blackmailed with secretly recorded audio of his marital infidelity. Ironically some people regard this as King's fault not Hoover's.

Well, a point can be made that all leaders are responsible for living a moral life. At least moral by their own standards - they would not be ashamed to admit it - and possibly confirming to society in all the areas which are not related to their agenda. Otherwise their mission gets lost in the scandal and all their supporters hard work, financial support and sometimes even imprisonment and torture goes to waste. Bill Clinton screwed more than hundred million voters when he received oral sex from Monica. As a result, we had to put up with 8 years of G.W.Bush and an unnecessary war. Likewise, MLK should have put his moral authority in jeopardy.

Re:Blackmail material.

[khallow]

What happens when only one side needs to lead a moral life? Especially if evidence can be fabricated?

Re:Blackmail material.

[AHumbleOpinion]

You think Bin Laden and Mullah Muhammed Omar are dumb enough to be googling "Bomb" no they're using trusted couriers and decentralized structures that don't rely on the use of easily traced e-mails.

No, but their couriers may be dumb enough to have done so in the past, or that kid googling today will grow up to be a courier. Analyzing networks of connections, many of them perfectly legal and harmless, has been an effective way to detect cutouts and others insulating high ranking criminals. It will work for terrorist cells too.

Re:Blackmail material.

[Tim C]

The simple fact of the matter is that once you give someone the ability to spy on you they will use it, for themselves.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's inevitable that they will use it for themselves, but I think it's almost certain that their successor will.

The real issue isn't whether you trust your current government with sweeping powers, it's whether or not you trust any and all future governments with those same powers.

Future Projections... ?

[Adeptus_Luminati]

2007...

Step 1. Encrypt all outbound traffic (hushmail, https, sftp, ssh, etc).
Step 2. Use TOR to anonymize all your source/destinations
Step 3. Simultaneously run encrypted torrent traffic (say 25% of all your bandwidth) to increase volumes of crap they have to sort through, making their costs increase.
Step 4. Where possible borrow your neighbours unencrypted WiFi/WiMax connections to do your real encrypted/anonymous surfing.

2009... 100Gigabit Ethernet is standardized & sold to carrier backbones. 10G Ethernet becomes cheap & FTTH becomes more affordable. The crappiest computer you can buy now is a quad core with a combined core speed of 10Gigahertz speed.
------------
2010... Their retort: Use Quantum computing to break your encryption. Buy kilometers of underground bases and install thousands of rows of racks filled with multi-terabyte hard drives to store it all.
------------
2011... You upgrade your computer with a quantum chip and use unbreakable encryption.
----------
2012... They are *$(*#ed and you WIN! All Internet is now encrypted and unbreakable and everyone has multi-terabyte hard drives and multi-hundred Megabit or gigabit speeds to home.

Re:Future Projections... ?

[Anonymous Coward]

----------
2013... Encryption is outlawed. Worldwide.
----------
2014... You are *$(*#ed and you LOSE! All encrypters is now jailed.

Re:Future Projections... ?

[TheMeuge]

You forgot the key date:

2008/9 - When it becomes a felony to use any encryption that does not have a back door for the NSA (or RIAA... whichever comes first).

Re:Future Projections... ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you need a separate, encrypted version of every different protocol? Why not just put an encryption layer directly on top of IP so any traffic, whether ftp or http, would get encrypted?

Re:Future Projections... ?

[Jessta]

oh, you mean like IPv6?
Yeah, apparently nobody sees a reason to upgrade to it.

Re:Future Projections... ?

[baadger]

How can they prove you are using encryption and are just in fact, not transmitting garbage for fun? ;-)

Re:Future Projections... ?

[Agripa]

2008/8 - Users begin switching from encryption to sending lots of plain text.
2008/9 - When it becomes a felony to use any encryption that does not have a back door for the NSA (or RIAA... whichever comes first).

Re:Future Projections... ?

[LiquidCoooled]

Why not just wait until there is a large enough cloud of wifi routers and just go under the radar with real p2p?

Re:Future Projections... ?

[stratjakt]

No, he means SSL.

I don't think he knows session layers from application and presentation layers.

I don't think anyone here does.

Re:Future Projections... ?

[Chabil Ha']

2011... You upgrade your computer with a quantum chip and use unbreakable encryption. ---------- 2012... They are *$(*#ed and you WIN! All Internet is now encrypted and unbreakable and everyone has multi-terabyte hard drives and multi-hundred Megabit or gigabit speeds to home.

Nothing is unbreakable. If a human created it, it has weakness. This may sound fatalistic, but it's the sad reality. It's an arms race for sure, and winning may involve keeping something secret for a determined finite amount of time, but in the end if there's a trace left, it can be solved.

Re:Future Projections... ?

[Opportunist]

Erh... no.

2008: Everyone starts using encryption and TOR. Everyone? No, just those that care about the whole surveillance (about 0.01% of the online population).

2009: A new law comes out that everyone in Germany who runs servers has to keep logs. This includes TOR operators, of course. Encryption for private use is outlawed, an exception is provided for online banking and corporation communication.

I guess you see where we're going.

Re:Future Projections... ?

[Adeptus_Luminati]

I could kind of see that in the US for the NSA... but the NSA isn't going to bust your door down because you downloaded a copyrighted album of Metalica. Allowing the RIAA to have access to all encryped backdoor traffic would never fly. 3 Examples:

1) For instance, a friend of mine uses encrypted VPNs to access his work's computer from home. He works for a stock market fund managing company... it would seriously impact their business if their employees could not VPN in from home.

2) What about IT people that have to troubleshoot company infrastructure at 2AM from home? If they have to drive 1 hour to work and do it in front of the servers, that's 1 more hour of unecessary downtime that business would experience.

3) What about joe-average who wants to do online banking from home? Why should the MAFIAA have access to his banking passwords?

Also quantum computers WILL have unbreakable encryption, because of the laws of quantum physics. I'm no physicist but the basis of the theory is that, that (at the quantum level) which is observed, is instantly altered. In other words, if you even try to look inside at the encryption key, it alters it, and it breaks the encrypted session. So you will know immediately if somebody is snooping. There is no way to 'tap' information.

Now you can say, they will outlaw Quantum computers for joe-average... and that might occur initially, but could only be a temporary measure. Just like how they initially outlawed the exportation of really fast 1 Ghz Sun computers to Asia... until it was deemed to be an exercise in futility. Eventually some genius in Russia, Romania, or some less anal country would 'invent' their own version of quantum computers (heck there's probably a .torrent, wikipedia article or Youtube video on how to make one by now) and then sell it on the black or white market... you know like how Canadians aren't allowed to buy TIVO but can buy it from the States, or people buying/installing mod chips in the gaming consoles that are probably made in China. etc.

Also public WiMAX or even WiFi version N which extend radius of transmission/reception significantly more than WiFi B/G will also allow any 'future illegal' encryption to be used relatively anonymously. There will ALWAYS be a way.

I just think that Quantum computing will be the LAST frontier... after that they are F***'ed as they can no long snoop or break your encryption, and that my friends may very well be the day that citizens (ignorant as they are) may actually have a chance that true freedom of speech!

Re:Future Projections... ?

[Adeptus_Luminati]

1) The wikipedia article on Quantum Crytography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_cryptography
2) The Youtube Videos: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Quantum+Cryptography
3) The Quantum Computing torrents: http://btjunkie.org/search?q=Quantum+Computing

There you go Russia/Romania... Now please don't dissapoint come 2012 ;-)

Re:Future Projections... ?

[KDR_11k]

because right now there is no quantum computer with enough RAM to handle even a 2048bit key?

Re:Future Projections... ?

[Anonymous Coward]

2012... They are *$(*#ed and you WIN! All Internet is now encrypted and unbreakable and everyone has multi-terabyte hard drives and multi-hundred Megabit or gigabit speeds to home. Uhh.. we'll die in 2012, haven't you heard?

http://survive2012.com/

According to their calendar, the Maya believed that their world would end on Dec 21, 2012. Of all the dates put forth by prophets and cultures for a doomsday, this is one with an authentic almost eerie feel to it. But what will happen? A global cataclysm is one possibility. Presented here is enough information to help you decide - be you an expert or a beginner.

Re:Future Projections... ?

[maxwell demon]

2012... They are *$(*#ed and you WIN! All Internet is now encrypted and unbreakable and everyone has multi-terabyte hard drives and multi-hundred Megabit or gigabit speeds to home. Uhh.. we'll die in 2012, haven't you heard?

http://survive2012.com/

According to their calendar, the Maya believed that their world would end on Dec 21, 2012. Of all the dates put forth by prophets and cultures for a doomsday, this is one with an authentic almost eerie feel to it. But what will happen? A global cataclysm is one possibility. Presented here is enough information to help you decide - be you an expert or a beginner. That was only a misinterpretation, because their prophets had no clue about modern technology. Due to all data being encrypted after 2012, they seemed not to get any meaningful data from after that time, so they incorrectly concluded that there's no meaningful data after that time, because the world ended.

Re:Future Projections... ?

[sulimma]

This was proposed by Manfred Kanther in germany a long time ago and had quite strong backing politically. Then someone in the EU found out that the US is mining long distance communication for trade secrets to give to US companies. Suddly encryption was officially encouraged by the government because the threat of terrorism might justify the demolition of civil right, but not giving technology to another country.

The dark night of fascism

[Anonymous Coward]

The dark night of fascism is always falling in America, but it always manages to actually land in Europe.

Re:The dark night of fascism

[iminplaya]

Well yeah. They about 7 or 8 hours ahead of us. And to all of you who go around saying that Europe is freer than the states, HA HA! The fascism is in us all. The smugness doesn't play too well, from either side of the ocean.

Same old shit

[unity100]

You vote some party into power, and they ignore you for 4 years and do whatever they please.

Um.

[neimon]

So. Like. They have a law? That admits what they expect? And defines what they're allowed to do? And there's a limit to what they can do? And it can help identify evildoers? But after 6 months, the data goes away? And we're thinking that's scary? Sounds like goddamned paradise to me. Here, they just drag you off and you disappear and *no carrier*

Re:Um.

[KDR_11k]

According to the Tagesschau website the data stored is your connection to the ISP, not what you do on the internet itself. It can only be accessed if a court permits it and it's about a "crime of severe gravity or committed using telecommunication" (secret services are exempt). Supposedly it's to find other evildoers after one acts so when a suicide bomber explodes they get his data and check who he had business with. Not sure if this permits retrieval of information in copyright infringement cases but if it's made to follow the intentions it should not permit retrieval before there is proof that the subject did it.

IP Allocation, not connection

[corsec67]

If you read the article, it seems like they are required to save the IP you are assigned, and when. Not the IPs you connect to, but the one you got via DHCP.

So, a few orders of magnitudes less data.

Re:IP Allocation, not connection

[bdraschk]

Quoted from http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/

from 2008 onwards it will be possible to trace who has contacted whom via telephone, mobile phone or e-mail for a period of six months. In the case of mobile calls or text messages via mobile phone, the user's location will also be logged. Anonymising services will be prohibited. Sorry, it's not yet the content that is supposed to be kept, but who's talking to whom, that will be kept.

Re:IP Allocation, not connection

[bdraschk]

Actually, i was wrong. When accessing the Internet, only IP addresses will be kept, not who's talking to whom or what protocol. Should have read the sources myself, sorry.

Hm, I just wondered...

[KDR_11k]

What about UDP packets? Do ISPs have to track every single one of them or are they ignored? Better make sure they have to record every single update packet my online games cause just so dem terrists cannot hide their communications in UDP!

Re:Hm, I just wondered...

[flyingfsck]

Or ICMP packets? That will be *really* useful.

Re:Hm, I just wondered...

[gronofer]

As I read the article, they aren't logging individual packets.

Re:Hm, I just wondered...

[Opportunist]

Please, please, people, realize you're dealing with legislators who start looking in a post office when you talk about packets.

You are aware that they had no idea about the detail when they made up that law, right?

Re:Hm, I just wondered...

[EelcoV]

They are ignored. UDP or TCP have nothing to do with this. Connections are not tracked and retained. The new law allows retention of the IP address(es) allocated to you. If you're on a DSL-connection, or connect through a cable modem, you only receive an IP address when you switch on the router. Which is once every other month, in many cases. Or once a day, if you switch off your router at night.

Re:Hm, I just wondered...

[Anonymous Coward]

UDP or TCP have nothing to do with this. Connections are not tracked and retained.

Actually, the authorities in Denmark are apparently requiring ISPs to retain, in addition to address allocation data, the header data (source and destination address, source and destination port number, transport protocol) of every 500th IP packet.

You may find this PowerPoint file an interesting read. It's from this presentation, which I higly recommend watching (MPEG-4 H.264 video file, 186 MiB).

Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Nazi Fascist Thinking - Bug Everybody.

Silly, that just means anybody who would cause trouble resorts to off-line communication.

Remember that place called 'Reality' - ya, people can talk there too.

Not everything.

[LuckyStarr]

They are required to save every location of every cell phone call made for six months.

Investigator: "You can't deny it. I know exactly whom you met in the forest 3 months ago."

Thats scary.

At least they are upfront

[flayzernax]

At least German Govmnt is (i hope) being upfront about it, it looks like they are. Much better then the ISP's just voluntarily keeping all traffic including content and handing it over to the government no questions asked. But in the US carnivore has been around doing something similar with Email header info's etc... for along time and in and out of the courts etc.

The German Government is Pissed

[The Breeze]

They see the United States slowing turning to a Nazi-like state and they're determined to defend their intellectual property by returning to Nazism first.

Why is it so hard for some otherwise reasonable people to understand that in a society where everything and everyone is tracable, sooner or later those in power can spank down a few annoying people and everyone will get the idea that if they speak out, they could be next?

Re:The German Government is Pissed

[KDR_11k]

Probably because the StaSi didn't have any of that fancy technical or legal support and still managed it far better than any western secret service? The most effective monitoring is by people and the StaSi had craploads of people everywhere, random civilians that weren't suspicious to anyone until the dissidents suddently found themselves betrayed by the man they thought was their best friend.

Re:The German Government is Pissed

[Anonymous Coward]

God has the power to just wipe the devil out of existance, but he doesn't so that people won't be afraid.

Of course we saw it coming

[Anonymous Coward]

The difference is that at least in Germany, this type of gross invasion of privacy happened on the public record and they can react and do something about it now.

i doubt that. seriously, we have many sheeple here in germany who will vote for CSU, CDU, SPD (grand colation parties in charge of the country and responsible for this law) again over some issue like speed limit on german highways. ppl demonstrated against it, but mainstream media widely ignores them. the only thing one can do now to abolish this law is go to the german surpreme court and several thousand germans have chosen to do so. but today, it's a fact: the law is there.

if it will ever be to bad, german constitution has a rather odd article in it: 20 (4) says that as ultima ratio resistance against ppl who try to abolish the constitution is justified. catch-22 here: ppl who will do that are in currently charge of the country.

posting anonymous b/c of being german, obviousy. also, captcha is "against".

IP address tracking: means your ISP IP address

[adnonsense]

Just to be clear on one point: the IP address tracking mentioned in articles on this subject is the IP address allocated by your ISP, not the IP addresses you connect to. Which is bad enough, and on the basis of existing laws there was a ruling that ISPs aren't allowed to retain your IP connection history for privacy reasons.

Personally I've alway assumed IP addresses are inherently traceable, so in a practical sense this doesn't make any difference to me (except that no doubt I'll end up paying for the extra costs incurred by my ISP). It's the other stuff I find more worrying - and completely asinine at the same time, because anyone with anything to hide (including teh terrorists) will know how to work round them anyway.

Re:IP address tracking: means your ISP IP address

[rekoil]

Good, I just posted in the related firehose story how logging every connection from each user would likely cause a huge data-storage issue - ISPs that do Netflow accounting (such as the one I work for) only keep the data long enough to do realtime traffic analysis and still have to store it on big disks if they want to hold onto it for a day, much less six months.

Re:IP address tracking: means your ISP IP address

[jo42]

Time to invest in storage companies, nyet komrade?

Re:IP address tracking: means your ISP IP address

[Bender Unit 22]

Just want to point out that a logging like that just started in Denmark this September. Source and destinaton IP, port. each 500th packet. email sender and reciever etc. It is required for each service provider to log this for at least 6 months I believe. Of course there are a lot of loopholes where they don't need to look lige small apartment nets etc.

Re:IP address tracking: means your ISP IP address

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but what's more worrying is that they are going to track email contacts too and of course PGP does not hide any headers, not even the subject.

All I have to say is ...

[ScrewMaster]

Hey Germany! How does that gaping hole in your left podal extremity feel?

Re:All I have to say is ...

[maxwell demon]

Well, you know, if your left foot is damaged, you have to move your weight to the right in order to relieve your left foot.

attn sysadmins: strike

[Anonymous Coward]

Otherwise you're complicit, and that means you're to blame.

Every sysadmin in the country, just stop working. A couple dozen do it, and that's just 12 sysadmins without a job. Several thousand do it, and the government will realise that it exists to serve the people, not vice versa.

None of this, "Oh oh but I have commitments to my family," bullcrap. We're all unemployed from time to time. Hopefully none of us would do jobs that more obviously involve the destruction of our freedoms, even if that means temporary hardship - so let's not allow us to be indirectly responsible either.

N.B. Yes, I've put my personal progress above everything in the past. I have since grown, and gone on to quit jobs over moral concerns. Yes, I enjoy my life more as a moral man than as a rich man. It's easy to make money; it's much harder to express love for the freedom of one's fellow man, and to prepare to act on that love.

Ve haf Vays of making you talk you know....

[cc_pirate]

Or at least of making your ISP talk...

Becoming what you hate

[WebmasterNeal]

It's funny how policies like this which are presumably trying to stop neo-nazi groups and terrorists ends up making the German government act like the nazis. Ends justify the means?

Good, Second Best Solution...

[Anonymous Coward]

is to use Freenet at http://freenetproject.org/. It's an anonymous p2p application.

I used to think that Freenet really wasn't that useful, but it's becoming clear that it's necessary as an insurance policy against censorship.

If you think about any law that has been created with regard to the internet, was it to protect and promote it or was it to try to censor and control? What's nice is Freenet was lacking in 'useful' content since the Internet was free enough for the 'wierd' things to be readily available. However, with a crackdown in many countries (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7047336.stm), including Italy (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/27/1137253) there will likely me more and more people who have use and need of Freenet, and thus increasingly more things to do and see.

possible solution

[rucs_hack]

for several years, as a solution to an account of mine being marked as spam by my university because a colleague got his pc infected, I've used movie quotes in every email header.

Its been successful, everyone I mail expects this, and on the rare occasions that they have received emails from me not using this format I've got confirmation mails asking if it was really me.

Possibly this wouldn't work for eveyone, but I suggest it, since it works for me.

This is great news.

[DrSkwid]

Now some enterprising German company is going to implement secure validated email and break away from SMTP/POP3 thus rendering the legislation useless.

Email headers. How does one enshrine what a header is in law ([^: ]+): ?(.*)

Go .de

Re:This is great news.

[maxwell demon]

Do they only require the saving of email headers, or also of protocol data?
You know, the actual mail headers are mostly irrelevant for the mail transport, so you could send a mail to anyone with

From: Undisclosed Sender
To: Undisclosed Recipients

and still have the mail delivered correctly as long as the correct commands are sent on the SMTP server.

Re:This is great news.

[DrSkwid]

I expect a certain amount of cluelessness is involved. One should sit the legislators down in front of telnet and ask them to send some mail with SMTP and then collect it via pop3 or IMAP.

Good Timeline - Also add Freenet

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd also add 'Freenet', since it's a one stop shop for anonymous information. The thing is a lot of people go there looking for stuff, but if you're hosting a bandwidth heavy website (such as one of the many *chan image boards, music, books, etc.) why not also host it there for free?

it's boosting public interest in cryptography

[Anonymous Coward]

That this law was passed so anti-democraticly and in public, probably helped us long-term. Many of my friends are now asking for support with hard disk and communication encryption. I even expect commercials to supply easy to use crypto devices in result. (something like PGPphone..)

Envelope information is fair game

[mi]

Before we in the U.S. get to patting ourselves on the back for not being this bad

It was ruled long ago by the American courts, that the information on the envelope of a letter is not subject to privacy expectations and can be examined by the police without a warrant.

Germany's surveilance of the e-mail headers and connection's IPs is no different — fair game, as long as the contents is not looked at.

It's not right in Germany, and it's not right here.

It's been "right" here and there for decades — possibly, centuries. I can not even find any links quickly, which means, it is certainly a pre-Internet thing...

Re:Envelope information is fair game

[Anonymous Coward]

It was ruled long ago by the American courts, that the information on the envelope of a letter is not subject to privacy expectations and can be examined by the police without a warrant.

Could there be a slight difference in proportionality between "being allowed to examine the information on the envelope of a letter without a warrant" and "requiring the information on the envelope of every single letter to be recorded and kept available for six months"?

Re:Envelope information is fair game

[KDR_11k]

In the EU, public does not automatically mean fair game. You can take a photo in public but if there's anyone on it and you're posting it publicly you're violating that person's rights. Any personally identifiable data is subject to data protection laws, the post office is not allowed to announce publicly who sent a letter where even though that data is written on the envelopes. I doubt the office is even allowed to store the data about sent letters once they no longer need it for accounting purposes (unless the data is to be stored for anti-terror crap but even then noone else is allowed to touch the data).

Re:Envelope information is fair game

[spikedvodka]

Before we in the U.S. get to patting ourselves on the back for not being this bad

It was ruled long ago by the American courts, that the information on the envelope of a letter is not subject to privacy expectations and can be examined by the police without a warrant.

Germany's surveilance of the e-mail headers and connection's IPs is no different — fair game, as long as the contents is not looked at.

It's not right in Germany, and it's not right here.

It's been "right" here and there for decades — possibly, centuries. I can not even find any links quickly, which means, it is certainly a pre-Internet thing...

Yes, but no.
Envolope: Address, adressee, sender, return address, location where it was mailed from (Via Postmark)
e-mail: Address, adresse, sender, return address, server that it was sent from, a list of every server it's touched since being sent, subject, unique identifier, what software was used, what's being responded to, what type of document is included in the message, possibly spam status flags (Anything Bold is not located on the outside of an envelope)

There's a lot more information in e-mail headers than there is on the outside of an envolope.

While I agree that the outside of a letter isn't secret, and can be examined without a warrant, I think that any such rules for e-mail should match a physical letter as to what can be "examined"

now comes the catch, in the physical mail, you'd have to open the letter to see what was inside, for e-mail all of the "examinable" information simply precedes the message, all you have to do is "keep reading" (if you're sniffing the wire) If you're watching server logs, typically the logs only show a message ID, the sender and the reciever.

The exact wording of the law would make a big difference

Re:Envelope information is fair game

[mi]

While I agree that the outside of a letter isn't secret, and can be examined without a warrant, I think that any such rules for e-mail should match a physical letter as to what can be "examined"

Nothing prevents the government from tracing the letter's progress through the (government's) Postal Service either. All stamping of the envelope would also be trackable...

now comes the catch, in the physical mail, you'd have to open the letter to see what was inside, for e-mail all of the "examinable" information simply precedes the message, all you have to do is "keep reading" (if you're sniffing the wire) If you're watching server logs, typically the logs only show a message ID, the sender and the receiver.

The new procedures being implemented consist of requiring the communication providers to archive the headers — it is not like we have to rely on the honesty of millions of human interceptors to turn away from the screen, when message's body is displayed on it right after the headers. If archiving the contents is not mandated, it will not be done — if only to save money and gobs of storage space.

What is the penalty for not complying?

[flyingfsck]

If the penalty is not hundreds of millions of Euros, then it would be cheaper to ignore the law and just log everything to /dev/null.

Re:What is the penalty for not complying?

[Opportunist]

I was pondering the same. Are they remotely aware what amount of data will be created that way? Even if they only want to log who talks with whom (that's the plan here at least), it means logging every single sync sent from you. Me. And everyone else using that ISP.

The amount of data alone is stunning. The overhead to store this flood of information for 6 months costs millions.

So, unless the penalty is equally large, as an ISP I'd simply go "here's a binary 4, read my fingers. Sue me, it's cheaper."

apparently, they dont need to: see guantanamo (nt)

[erlehmann]

no text

logical fallacy

[erlehmann]

It's been "right" here and there for decades -- possibly, centuries.

same thing could be said about slavery some hundred years ago. only because something is law, it isn't automagically right.

Re:logical fallacy

[Anonymous Coward]

And abortion - as long as were off topic

really stupid OP ?

[erlehmann]

PGP, man. also, who mods stuff like this up ?

Re:really stupid OP ?

[rucs_hack]

PGP, man. also, who mods stuff like this up ?

So how exactly would pgp stop my email address being nicked from someone elses adress book? Do tell.

Not all of us live in a state of paranoia and therefore we don't use PGP for everything.

Re:really stupid OP ?

[maxwell demon]

Digital signature.
PGP can do more than encryption.

Living in Germany you should know better than that

[Qbertino]

>> Maybe somewhere in the Swiss Alps?
>As being German: Definitely yes. Island may be an other option to consider
>If the current politics remain, Germany is going to be a police and
>surveillance state in near future...

Living in Germany you should know better than that.

Don't worry. In two months from now someone will the surveilance will cost money and jobs and eventually eliminate 15% of the positions for human investigators at the federal german BKA, thus costing more jobs. An uproar will shake the nation. Some guy at some obscure bureau of the Interior Ministry will also notice that this law makes their recent pet project, the German Federal Trojan (TM) officialy 65% superfluos. Another big no-no. Some other intellectual will publically notice that all info about all Germans is either available at StudiVZ (Germanys Facebook/MySpace), Amazon.de Marketplace or Ebay Germany anyway - which is allready completely scanned and archived (backups included) by the German IRS - and we know everything worth knowing about everybody allready. 10-15 different factions and public bodies of interest groups will have allready filed 20 complaints to the Federal Constitutional Court and the country will be plaqued by a lengthy debate that will have Secretary of the Interior Schäuble eventually drive his wheelchair off a cliff in frustration. Just before the current coalition of two big parties ends it's legislature there will be a watered down full-compromise version of the law with 8500 exception rules and modifications delivered on 2000+ pages in three big-ass Leitz file-covers, German style. Two months after the federal vote and three months into the new law someone in the EU Gouverment Headquarters will notice that this law breaks somewhere between 23 and 65 terms of union contracts, the British will wine that the Germans are now also attempting to take over the EU lead in surveilance, directly competing the UKs last big resort of excellence. Eventually the then new German gouverment will be bitch-slapped into revising its 10kg online surveilance law into a new draft as not to be fined by Brussels for a kazillion Euros.

Bottom line: No need to worry yet. Even by the most optimistic projections I wouldn't expect this law to gain any tracktion before 2015.

propaganda everywhere

[erlehmann]

policies like this which are presumably trying to stop neo-nazi groups and terrorists

yeah. as if /anyone/ with a brain believes that bullshit.

Re:propaganda everywhere

[WebmasterNeal]

Do you care to elaborate more?

Let them regress..

[brxndxn]

And we will expand our civil liberties! Ronpaul2008.com

EU law

[emilv]

This law is necessary for all countries which are members of the European Union to implement, because it is a EU directive.
Germany are not the only country in EU that will pass this law. Every country in the union are obliged to have their telephone companies and ISPs keep the information for at least six years (I think Sweden are going to recuire the companies to keep the data for at least a year, but I have not followed the debate for the last months).

It is important to point out, however, that it's only the metadata that will be saved. You can see that a person have contacted another person, and probably even where this was (if it's a mobile phone), but you can't see what they have been talking about.

Re:EU law

[Opportunist]

Oh please, don't try to brush it of on the big, bad EU that interferes with your national legislation. It's not like the German representatives there voted against this bullcrap.

Too often our politicians use the EU as a petty excuse to push unpopular laws. "We can't help it, the EU makes us" has far too often been the excuse. I don't buy it anymore. If they really don't want to implement it, they should vote against it in the EU Parlament or shut the f. up.

Re:EU law

[EelcoV]

Wow, finally a sensible statement is being made! Why doesn't anyone congratulate Germany for choosing the least privacy-harming option? The directive allows a retention period between 6 months and 24 months. Already the Netherlands opted for 18. Germany's 6 months is the best possible.

And no, the law does not allow for the retention of email headers. Headers are considered "content of communication", and retention of content is strictly forbidden. It's the sender's address and recipients' addresses from the SMTP envelope that are retained.

Re:EU law

[dunkelfalke]

let me explain to you how it works:
some german ministers want to introduce some new crap law to become a police state.
then they see that this law could be rendered as unconstitutional (or they just try to implement it and fail).
they go to eu and spin-doctor that crap there so it goes back to germany as an eu directive and the ministers can say they could do nothing about it.

Re:EU law

[aproposofwhat]

This has absolutely fuck all to do with the European Parliament - directives come from the European Commission, which is run by corrupt and failed politicians nominated by their government cronies from each member state, plus a bureaucracy of intellectual midgets lining their pockets at the expense of every European taxpayer.

Voting against EC directives in the Parliament has no bearing on whether the directives are passed by the Commission, and member states are bound by law to implement the directives.

Here in the UK, our variously inept government departments implement every new directive with such enthusiasm that silly matters like the principles of common law, natural justice etc. are often crushed under the jackboot of EU conformity.

Other countries (I'm looking at you, Italy and France) seem to take a common-sense approach to implementing directives, and often fail to implement them at all, if implementation makes things worse for their citizens.

The EU needs to be scaled down, back to the free trade area it should be - in the era of the WTO, perhaps each nation can now work for free trade independently, and cut the EC fraudsters and control freaks out of a job.

Re:EU law

[Opportunist]

Sorry, my fault. But the result is the same, maybe stronger so. The governments, that brush off responsibility for said laws on the EU, form that Commission.

Italy is blessed with a rather inefficient government. Yes, I say blessed. In times like these, what you can only hope for is a government so divided that they cannot get any laws passed.

maybe like ...

[erlehmann]

... this ?

Re:maybe like ...

[maxwell demon]

From the linked page:
"Therefore the developers have asked the user community not to mention the software in high publicity websites like Slashdot."

All connections

[Anonymous Coward]

The Internet bullet seems to be talking about call detail records "and the line which was used " reference not source destination pairs at the IP level? There is a *huge* difference between the two.

If this is the case many states have similiar rentention statutes on the books for ISPs already in the US.

On the Email part I'm sure all of those who live in Allied countries would be willing to help non Axis aligned citizens living in Germany with their SMTP tunneling needs until this temporary impass of sanity on the part of the German government can be averted?

Protests ignored by the government

[nurb432]

Well of course it was. Its for your safety.

what's with guilt by association ?

[erlehmann]

You can see that a person have contacted another person, and probably even where this was (if it's a mobile phone), but you can't see what they have been talking about.

ever heard of Andrej Holm ? he and his family were (and are still) constantly snooped just b/c he used the same words as other suspects and was intellectual. ah, yeah and also:

Holm's home and office were searched, after one man he had met with was implicated in a plot to firebomb tanks at a German military base.

Re:what's with guilt by association ?

[emilv]

I know it's bad. I just wanted to make sure everybody knew the distinction, because it could be even worse.

In Sweden they are going to let the intelligence bureau (FRA) do an automatic live search through all communication that go over the country's borders, including 98% of all the Internet traffic, in the search for terrorists and other threats against the nation.

It's Reinhard Heydrich all over again

[Cannelloni]

So this is the new policy from a country that gave rise to the Gestapo, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and after the war the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS) or Stasi? Now even I am scared...

Re:It's Reinhard Heydrich all over again

[delt0r]

Unlike the Gestapo, the police will need a warrant to view the data.

Re:It's Reinhard Heydrich all over again

[Cannelloni]

Oh good, I feel safer already! :D

You and what army of disks?

[Qubit]

How long can you retain data if you send email with the content in the headers?

At some point, even if you have Terabytes of disk space, you're going to run out of room. Then what?

Here's a sure-fire way to mess things up:

1. Implement IP over SMTP headers. (already done, I believe)
2. Use it in Germany.
3. Watch as your ISP hates you. A lot.

But anyhow, it says that it's retaining headers, but not content. But sometimes there's content in the headers, right? Got a Catch-22 there, I think.

Re:You and what army of disks?

[gronofer]

All you need is a cooperating SMTP server (directing to /dev/null) and a generator of random giant crap headers, using two german ISPs. I suppose the ISPs would kick them off soon enough.

Print it out

[steve12345]

Do they say how the data should be stored? Are printouts okay? In random order. Can they store more than 6 months of data, all mixed up together? I think the data is a lot less useful to the government if it's hard to search.

Re:Print it out

[maxwell demon]

Or store it encrypted. "Oh yes, here's the data. It's encrypted, so no unauthorized reading is possible. Unfortunately we lost the decryption key ..."

Again, Not to be flamebait

[Derosian]

But why is it always Germany?

Re:Again, Not to be flamebait

[Cairnarvon]

It isn't. The English-speaking world is still comfortably ahead, in the West.

Near-miss

[billcopc]

It's times like this I'm so glad my server is in Amsterdam. Germany was actually my 2nd choice, because of the freedoms accorded (until now). A high ping is a small price to pay to dodge all these trigger-happy legislators, at least for the time being.

Forget Skynet, the government is becoming self-conscious. At least the robots only wanted to kill us quickly.

Re:Near-miss

[Opportunist]

The Netherlands ain't far behind. As it was already pointed out somewhere earlier, it's an EU directive that has to be implemented in all EU member countries. Germany is just being Germany by being the overachiver.

Re:Near-miss

[erikjan]

You're out of luck. As stated before in one of the arlier comments, the EU directive has to be implemented in all EU member states, including the Netherlands. Actually, it is already has been implemented in the Netherlands. Even worse, the retention period over here is 18 months (not six like in germany).

Re:Near-miss

[billcopc]

True, but since I run a dedicated server in a DC, I'm largely unaffected by The Netherlands' implementation of this directive. Technically nobody is "dialing into" my server, I'm not assigning anyone an IP address, so I have no connection logs to keep. I still perform very defensive logging, but its intended purpose is simply to help me in my tasks as a system administrator (like dropping every single packet from Korea and China).

The day the government comes asking for my logs, will be the day I close up shop. The gov't doesn't get a log of all the people who commerce with me in person, my online visitors are entitled to the same level of privacy and anonymity that they would enjoy in my physical establishment.

There used to be a time, long long ago, when government was created by people. Technically, we own this big broken machine, every one of us. We pay its upkeep, we share its infrequent benefits, we own this bitch. I think it's high time the people were reminded of this fact and told the appointed proxies we call Presidents, Senators and Ministers who's boss.

Torrent of the Parliament and Debate

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a torrent of the debate and the vote (in german). Copyright by german TV channel "Phoenix", format is RealVideo 4 within AVI container (MPlayer plays it).

http://141.76.2.8/~s9053014/German%20Data%20Retention%20-%20Parliament%20Debate%20and%20Vote.torrent

Re:Torrent of the Parliament and Debate

[mjbkinx]

Thank you, kind Anon!

No Revolution for you...Not yours

[zildgulf]

We have more food, water, power, etc. than we need and we can get the goods we need (at a price). Now, if we can't get stuff we want at any price and we no longer have water, or power, or food, then that's the stuff that revolutions are made from. In today's political climate, economic realities make a major revolution unlikely in America or Western Europe.

And YES, we have at least a million Americans totally brainwashed and mindf*cked enough that if, for some highly outlandishly unlikely chance, President Bush decides to declare a State of Emergency and suspends elections next year, these people would not terribly mind this inconvenience. They would come to believe that this would be a necessary action and the President Bush would be in the right for doing it. For them, the President cannot be wrong and can do no wrong. I guarantee we will hear a LOT from this group during the next 12 months because they don't like any of the current Republicans and they certainly hate the Clintons with all of their soul.

Re:Living in Germany you should know better than t

[Opportunist]

...the country will be plaqued by a lengthy debate that will have Secretary of the Interior Schäuble eventually drive his wheelchair off a cliff in frustration

Any way I can help? Grease the wheels? Or his breaks?

It's time to write a nice little tool

[Opportunist]

One that just goes and creates random SYN packets, sending them to random IP addresses and ports and watching the logs go berserk in the process.

With enough people participating, one could even create a network of some sort, where successful syncs are shared and repeated by others, so actual commections (and thus log entries) are created at an elevated rate.

As my statistics prof always preached, the only thing that's worse than having too little data is to have poisoned data.

Broadcasters, Narrowcasters???

[thorpie]

Must be lucky TV stations that broadcast are differentiated from ISP's, because they don't know who picks up their signals.
If a TV station starts sending out public http/tcp packets then no-one knows who picks up the packet, so one half of their connection information does not exist.
Then all you need is a similar narrowcast upload methodology and the other half of the connection information does not exist either.
Besides, public broadcasting of http/tcp packets, combined with a cache on your computer, would cut traffic.
Would anyone know if this has been implemented and whether any browsers support it? I mean, for 99.999% of my traffic i do not give a frig who sees it, and for 80% I do not care who knows that I asked for it.
Public http with a ticker tape in the browser of what is coming in, with the browser set to store pages of particular interest would speed up my connection (most items would already have been read by one of the 10,000 people on my node within the last hour!), would cut down on network complexity (if 50% of traffic is node-to node instead of peer-to-peer) and cut down on traffic.

Re:Broadcasters, Narrowcasters???

[Anonymous Coward]

Some "internet via satellite" services are completely unencrypted. With a suitable receiver you can capture everything sent to all the subscribers connected via a transponder, from anywhere within the footprint.
Software exists to re-assemble files from HTTP or NNTP streams and save "interesting" files to disk. That way you can capture files that are illegal to receive or possess, without any possibility of this transaction being logged with your identity.
(of course you do not get to choose what files you get. but in some cases you could request a server to send data to some subscriber and then capture it)

Can't, anti-environmental

[AHumbleOpinion]

Do they say how the data should be stored? Are printouts okay?

No, too many environmentalists in Germany. ;-)

Meta-conspiracy theory

[Cheesey]

The meta-conspiracy theory says that Governments now encourage conspiracy theories in order to decrease the "signal to noise" ratio outside of official media channels.

The result is that independent media is totally unreliable because every fact is swamped by a million paranoid half-truths and lies. But the official media is also unreliable due to bias. So, (1) people have no reliable source of information, and (2) almost any criticism of the Government can be dismissed as the ravings of a crazy conspiracy theorist.

The problem is... where totalitarian dictatorships went wrong in the past, is that they try and shut people up. That causes trouble. There's really no need to to quieten and remove dissidents. No-one really cares.

Indeed yes. You don't need to "disappear" the dissenters. You just need to make them look like crazy paranoids, and in many cases, they are perfectly capable of doing that for themselves.

EU directive

[Anonymous Coward]

It's probably worth pointing out that this is not another whacko German thing - this is based on an EU directive. Of course, one should also add that that directive is currently being contested by Ireland, so there's no need for anyone to implement it yet; the reason Germany does anyway is that it's currently easy to hide behind that and say "we've got no choice but to do this".

Depending on the outcome of Ireland's case, don't think you're gonna be safe anywhere else in the EU, either, though. Time to move to Switzerland, or possibly Norway.

But I'll bet you almost anything ...

[Anonymous Coward]

"All opposition parties voted against the bill. Several members of the opposition and several hundred private protesters announced a constitutional complaint."

That if the opposition gets into power they won't put forward a bill to repeal it.

Re:But I'll bet you almost anything ...

[maxwell demon]

Since the opposition currently only consists of the small parties (both large parties are forming a coalition right now), it's extremely improbable that there will be a government any time soon which doesn't include one of the parties currently in power.

Re:But I'll bet you almost anything ...

[KnuthKonrad]

That if the opposition gets into power they won't put forward a bill to repeal it.

One of the "opposition parties", the Green party, was in the government when the EU directive made its way through the EU bureaucracy...

Being an EU law is no excuse

[Anonymous Coward]

For example Finland has continuously received shit for e.g. people importing alcohol from abroad (inside EU) for ones own use. This is because Finland has an alcohol monopoly and the state receives money for all alcohol sold in special shops. So they clearly have no interest to follow EUs ideal of free movement of goods within EU. (*) There are other examples as well.

Why should they then follow this insanely stupid data retention law, since they've shown already they can say "screw it" to any EU law or directive they please?

(*) Likewise, there's a serious conflict of interest here. On one hand, the government tries to make alcohol abuse less because alcohol is a dangerous drug and causes so much misery. On the other hand, they try to make people consume more, because they make more money that way.

Re:I almost posted this in the AT&T spying com

[maxwell demon]

On Slashdot, they first moderated down troll posts, and I didn't speak up because I didn't want to troll.
Then they moderated down redundant posts, and I didn't speak up because it would have been redundant.
Then they moderated down offtopic posts, and I didn't speak up because it would have been offtopic.
Then they moderated down flamebait posts, and I didn't speak up because that would have been flamebait.
Then they moderated down my posts as overrated, but at that time there was no one with mod points left to correct it.

...it was ignored by the government.

[night_flyer]

Yeah, there has been a lot of that going around lately

Legal Challenge to European data retention laws

[Anonymous Coward]

A legal challenge has been started by Digital Rights Ireland before the Irish courts. If successful it should have the knock on effect of invalidating laws such as the German one. Full details here:

http://www.digitalrights.ie/2006/09/14/dri-brings-legal-action-over-mass-surveillance/

... Profit

[spikedvodka]

1) Invest in hard Drive companies
2) Send massive amounts of spam to germany
3) ?
4) Profit

hrmm... maybe 3 = send stock spam about Western Digital to boost price even more?

Yup. Democracy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. Democracy.

Logging already in place in Denmark :-(

[SplatMan_DK]

While this may be newsworthy for Germany, Denmark has already imposed such measures. Known as the "logging directive", all telco and ISPs are logging extensive information about telephone calls, e-mails and internet connections (including, but not limited to, HTTP connections and headers).

I wonder how long we have to accept politicians imposing such intrusive "counter-terrorist initiatives" in the name of freedom, when all it really does is take freedom away from the average citizen.

In addition, the whole mechanism is wildly flawed. Any sane terrorist or IT geek who wants to bypass the logging can do so - using anonymizer-servers in foreign countries, TOR networks, or just going downtown to a random café with a free WiFi Hotspot.

It would seem George Orwell lived (and died) in vain :-(

- Jesper

Re:Living in Germany you should know better than t

[stsp]

before the current coalition of two big parties ends it's legislature

[My english is better than most other people's german,

It is indeed.

so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]

You're welcome :)

Join the constitutional challenge

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're a resident of Germany, please help challenge this soon-to-be-law in the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht): https://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/content/view/51/70/ Deadline for sending in the power of attorney (Vollmacht): Monday, November 19.

Re:I almost posted this in the AT&T spying com

[billcopc]

mine would go:

And then they came for my traffic, but got distracted by all the pr0n and I shot the bastards!