Slashdot Mirror
German Chancellor Proposes European Communications Network
An anonymous reader sends word that German Chancellor Angela Merkel wants to build a European communication network to keep data transmission away from the United States. She plans to discuss the issue with French President Francois Hollande.
"Merkel said in her weekly podcast that she disapproved of companies such as Google and Facebook basing their operations in countries with low levels of data protection while being active in countries such as Germany with high data protection. 'We'll talk with France about how we can maintain a high level of data protection,' Merkel said. 'Above all, we'll talk about European providers that offer security for our citizens, so that one shouldn't have to send emails and other information across the Atlantic. Rather, one could build up a communication network inside Europe.' Hollande's office confirmed that the governments had been discussing the matter and said Paris agreed with Berlin's proposals."
"He may be a bastard, but he's our bastard"
I'd much prefer the data to be captured by European organizations than the NSA.
Then at least there is an option to protest against the local "legally bad guy", the US is destroying democracy because in practice voting anywhere outside of the US is useless.
Either you live in a dictatorship (Like for instance Equatorial Guinéa wich is protected by the US petrol industry and whose "president" gets elected with 95+ % whenever he feels bored) and then voting is just a "show", or you live in a democracy, and then it does not matter who you are voting for because the US economy is basically bullying whom ever was elected into working in the way most profitable for the US, and the only choice is to be hurt "right now" by sanctions (and loose the next election) or being hurt by bad policies in a couple of year (and hopefully it will be the oposition's mess to handle)...
So unless the European Union starts to fess up and do exactly the kind of things Angela Merkel is proposing the world would be split between a disfunctional democracy (the US) and non democratic countries, where the most powerful is the one run by the Chinese "communist" party, not the most desirable outcome... ...)
Including not very desirable for 99% of the US citizens, since it would end up with a small "elite" protected by an overreaching army and the rest of the citizens not really "needed" by the elite (with the exception of a minority of plumber, waitresses, hookers and other "personal service providers"
Are there even any ...
I think you've missed the whole point of this. The basic problem is that any packets that touch american soil become subject to american surveillance and american law. Even if the data / email / web pages are only transiting, fron one "free" country to another.
This is clearly unacceptable and since the americans don't have any motivation to fix the problem, the rest of the world (or at least: countries in Europe, at this stage) will just find a way to bypass it.
As the old saying goes: The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Whenever Merkel makes a comment, I instantly wonder what her real intentions are. And this time it didn't take long, she wants control over what information is coming into her area of reign.
If she was honest about wanting the US spying to end she'd first of all ferret out and shut down the various spying locations still scattered across Germany. It's not like the US never had bases there or shut them all down...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Pretty much studip idea to solve the problem. Encryption is the way to go rather than trying to build a parallel infrastructure which will anyway be subject to laws of the countries where the infrastructure is installed. It doesn't solve anything. It is not like other countries are not spying anyone else.
In fact, the proposed solution may just create the problem as well. What she propose is what China is building, a network owned by the State, managed by the State and purposedly for the best interest of the State.
Achille Talon
Hop!
I'm of no interests to secret services whatsoever
Yeah, that's not up to you to decide. Someone else will decide that and if your phone was at the wrong place at the wrong time and someone misread or misinterpreted some data you're going to be the guy on the floor with assault rifles pointed at your back and your family screaming around you. Better hope your realize the masked men are the cops so you don't struggle and get shot.
It's not like those doing the monitoring are certain to be competent or even guaranteed to be sane, and with signal-to-noise ratios being what they are and the extreme rarity of actual terrorists you can be sure that most hits will be false positives. Other people 'of no interest'.
Intent DOES matter to me and I do not think that any government in western democracies would dare misuse this power for oppressing people.
Oh, right, because we're not voting any representatives of ideologies that have shown no such restraint into power in Europe. Oh, wait...
So if you want to keep from being 'of no interest' in the future, better keep from saying anything that could possibly piss off communists, neonazis, religious fundamentalists or anyone else who might possibly wield power in the future during the rest of your life. The archives are going to remain but the intent of today has no binding power over future rulers.
Of course encryption would solve things. However, encryption would make it more difficult for her OWN intelligence service to spy on the citizens. That would be... double plus ungood.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)