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

Same old shit

[unity100]

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

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?

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: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.