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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.'"
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).
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One Word:
Crapflood.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Flood the internet with grabage
Oh, wait, spammers, worms and bots are already doing this.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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"?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
... of countries to escape to when things continue to get worse here in the US!
Maybe somewhere in the Swiss Alps?
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
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.
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)
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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; .torrents;
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
And then they came for my traffic, and by that time Request timed out.
Please make a better attempt at understanding '1984'.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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?
you will care, when you have to login to the outside of your house. And when it will be tracked where you go. ... ALWAYS!
If you find a typo, you may keep it.
You would think that the German people would look back on their own history and say "Never again!"
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
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.
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.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
You vote some party into power, and they ignore you for 4 years and do whatever they please.
Read radical news here
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*
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?
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.
Hey Germany! How does that gaping hole in your left podal extremity feel?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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 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...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Or ICMP packets? That will be *really* useful.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
>> 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.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
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.
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.
coding is life
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.
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Mod parent DoublePlusGood.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
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.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
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.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
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.
I will not give in to the terrorists. I will not become fearful.