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Dutch MEP Petitions To Ban Export of Surveillance Software
Trailrunner7 writes with this excerpt: "A Dutch member of the European parliament is supporting a grass-roots effort to restrict the export of surveillance software such as FinFisher and others, which are used by some governments and law-enforcement agencies to monitor their citizens' activities. The effort, dubbed Stop Digital Arms, is supported by Marietje Schaake, a member of the EU Parliament's International Trade committee. The petition itself is on the Change.org site, and it calls upon members of the European Union 'to give the European Commission the mandate to draft the laws and develop initiatives necessary to stop digital arms trade' ... In a report called 'For Their Eyes Only' released earlier this year, the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the university of Toronto detailed the spread of this software around the world and identified a slew of FinFisher command-and-control servers in countries such as Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States, among many others."
Can we add Carrier IQ and other spyware to the list? I'd also like to know how much data NSA got from Carrier IQ and how much Carrier IQ and the telcos that forced it to be installed, got paid by the NSA.
Be careful such a well-intentioned ban doesn't backfire.
Instead of banning software, how about reacting to what people DO with software?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
To translate: Dutch politicians attempt to ruin their own software industry, do nothing to stop digital surveillance.
if they didn't ban just export but import as well.
Great idea. The Dutch don't need Wireshark anyway.
Oh, wait, you mean "monitoring software" means software that can monitor traffic on the network?
How about jailing the people who actually abuse the tools to violate other people's rights, instead of trying to outlaw them?
John
By all means, let's drive it underground... and make it all classified..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Nothing will happen. Remember EU is not a democracy, and the EU parliament is a fake parliament. It does not vote the budget. It cannot start a directive initiative (only the EU commission can). The commission can remove amendments done by the parliament, and it already did it in the past. And of course the EU commission can ignore a proposal from the parliament. The only real power of the EU parliament is to reject a directive within the co-decision method.
Most of the time, the EU parliament vote non binding resolutions that are only relevant to the press. EU ideologists can then quote nice resolutions that will have no consequence in the real world, and tell us how good the EU is for EU citizen. But this kind of propaganda is getting less effective, as people face a harsh reality every day.
It may be possible to ban the SALE or TRADE of such software, but you can't very well stop someone from GIVING it away. After all, they can stand on the border and hold up printouts of the source code and invite people standing 5 feet away from them to take photos of it.
Well, I guess you COULD ban it if you are in a country that doesn't have or even pretend to have free-speech protections.
All any such ban will do would be to drive the R&D to other countries.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Others have said similar things already, but this will never work. Any tool that can be used to do something useful, can be used to harm someone else. That is true for most tools we humans use and also applies to most "cyber tools". Using a network scanner to find intruders or bad configured systems is good, using it to find someone that wants to get information out of a censored government is bad. Using a load tester to see if your system can handle the users it's designed for is good, but using it to take down some system that is run by someone you oppose of is bad.
She has no idea that the tools exclusively marketed as cyber weapons are nothing more than window dressing for existing things. Any government spending money on this either needs the window dressing and can't make their own, or is too stupid to understand this sort of thing. The more they spend money on cyber weapons, the less they will spend it on potentially more harmful things. Please let them be, it's a snake oil market and anyone buying the snake oil deserves what they get for their money.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
How about jailing the people who actually abuse the tools to violate other people's rights, instead of trying to outlaw them?
Hard to jail them when they work for the government.
"The Europeans" isn't actually a single group of people with a single agenda. Like "the Americans", it's composed of many different groups. One group, namely European politicians, gets a lot of coverage, and they find it advantageous to inflame anti-American sentiment to (1) get more attention and (2) push through legislation that otherwise wouldn't have much chance to be pushed through.
Mostly agree with your post, except I think this is not meant to "inflame anti-American sentiment" but rather it's timed to ride on that sentiment which is already quite inflamed enough, thank you very much, because of the US agencies' own doing.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
It would be more like a weapons export ban, where you are not allowed to export them to countries that are known to abuse them. In other words no selling telecom monitoring equipment to governments that then use it to oppress their citizens, like certain middle eastern countries or the US/UK.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Jailing members of foreign governments is typically quite difficult until after you've won a war against them.
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