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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."
to the problem of what the NSA is doing. And if an organization does it within Europe, what then?
Angela Merkel: "Screw Obama. I'm going to build my own internet, with blackjack and hookers. And privacy."
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
"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.
bunch of tax wasting bullshit.
BND & NSA are working together to some extend.
how is this plan keeping our privacy safe?
Well last time "France" "trusted" "Gernany" (without being invaded first) was at the time of Emperor Charlemagne (Karl der Grosse, Karolus Magnus, ...) ...)
that didn't work so bad (untill he died and handed over to his incapable sons who splitted the whole shebang
Won't this European network just be subject to the same censorship and spying paid for by American and Asian entities, as the current internet is anyway? Are there even any non-American and non-Asian entities capable of implementing and maintaining such a large scale network on their own, including using their own custom built non-American, non-Asian hardware, manufactured in a non-American, non-Asian factory?
This is a seriously complex undertaking they're suggesting.
Remember, she's the one who called the Internet 'virgin soil' last year. But she's not the only one who has no clue. Every other week some European politician speaks up, demanding billions of tax payer's money to create an independent European IT industry. These noobs really seem to think there'll be a day when they can say, "Look, Obama, we've got our own Intel, we've got our own Microsoft, you can kiss our asses." At the same time, these guys complain that they can't run their offices with Linux: "It's too complicated for our staff. Give us back our Windows XP, our MS Office, our Internet Explorer."
Nice try ...
So because the European governments are just as bad as the NSA we should not change anything and let the NSA go on spying on us ...
So how about we get the right to elect your representatives, senators and presidents after all at the en of the day this activity is costing us money (for instance whenever the US $ gets overprinted and becomes cheaper in practice it has the same effect as a tax on out exportations...
And what did those people say ? no taxation without representation ...
Now pleaqe get off my lawn ...
Of course it will be "interconnected" the issue is "where will it be possible to host at a reasonable price services to european citizens" and therefore "what law does apply" ...
The emphasis should be on encryption, not physical infrastructure. You can't audit, control and secure physical infrastructure for an internet, because it is by necessity, spread out across a large physical volume. You definitely can make it uneconomic to analyse the traffic.
Of course, this is probably an intentional oversight - all that infrastructure work is a great economic stimulus (or "pork barrel project" if you like). Why cloud the picture with reality when you can both spend billions of Euros on a jingoistic boondoggle AND still be able to collect SIGINT from your own people without difficulty?
Living in Germany, Snowden leaks didn't bother me much (and as I've heard from "Piraten Partei" member, most voters don't care either). I'm of no interests to secret services whatsoever and if checking my emails helps them fight some !@@#ers, I don't mind.
Intent DOES matter to me and I do not think that any government in western democracies would dare misuse this power for oppressing people.
From US perspective, I can understand you guys are worried about some of the surveillance being unconstitutional, but when law is breached at that level, it's like breaking UN laws, there is no authority to punish you.
To my knowledge, US (and, actually Israel) is present at German Exchange Points (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_exchange_point) so this move is more of a gesture, rather than actual protection.
Nevertheless Merkel's move is good for EU, already because it would create more jobs in Europe, so I welcome it.
We can do a much better job of spying and industrial espionage on our citizens than the NSA can if we build our own network.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Some time ago, there were suggestions by German Telekom of building a German infrastructure to ensure mails sent between German users would not be routed via the USA. Apart from ensuring German authorities would have it easier looking into traffic, I will hazard a guess that Telekom is lobbying to push this through, possibly forcing German providers to connect themselves to some newly designed infrastructure, which would most likely benefit German Telekom (either if they were operating those IXes, or by the lines put in to connect the providers). I do not have numbers as to the percentage, but most large to medium (and many smaller) German providers already are interconnected through DECIX, allowing for a short, cost-effective path between them. Oh, most, except for one - German Telekom (actually, they are connected, but do not have an open peering policy). Coincidence?
Why is it that so many governments seem so clueless with technology?
All of this is because Telekom is making other ISPs paying insane fes for peering, which forces them to route through the USA instead to have peering at a lower cost indirectly to Telekom (also known as Drosselkom), passing all data directly to the NSA and co.
aaaaaaa
The gouvernment which screwed end-to-end encryption by mandating a centralized "de-mail" concept to communicate with the administration shuts up.
Make a decentralized key signing (e.g. in the city hall) initiative, for a reasonable fee, and show your citizens hot to import these certificates in theirs browsers and mail programs.
Make sure the key generators use a decent random number generation, and for really important messages use one-time pads, or something which comes close.
All of my phones have enough storage for a real one-time pad for my important mail which i send in years. If mail providers would give me this opportunity (one-time pad for connection safety) and a decent PKI signing initiative would guarantee that the recipient can read the mail, then i would be happy.
One time pad connection safety would mean you can use this anywhere and choose a provider to your liking.
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.
You basically already do. Citizens United made sure you can since money is speech and "political donations" can be hidden.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
It's called the Internet - a network of networks where a subset of networks are EU exclusive. The problem is how to make sure that data packets aren't routed outside the EU - but that is another thing entirely. It shouldn't be that hard technically.
I'd rather be concerned with "you're not allowed to see this out-of-EU webpage because we don't want you to. signed, your government" messages.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well in the "best" of cases it would be a "Censitary" Suffrage where only people with enough money would be able to
vote and foreing "voters" need to pay more once to "buy" the vote and another time to "clean it up" and make it look
National....
And this kind of "democracies" do not end up very well...
Well, actually, the last time France trusted Germany was the formation of the EU.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The last time France (Alsace) and Germany (Saarland) trusted each other, what followed was the creation of EU.
The problem here is very simple. For the e-reforms EU wants to rely on Internet. They are simply forced to act, because they can't allow potentially sensitive data like tax information to flow via unreliable country like USA. The work in that direction was happening for some time now and I'm not really sure what current initiative entails. The only contentious point was the ICANN. One can see that EU and others want to fork it and if they are successful, the ICANN as we know it would be responsible exclusively for the Americas. IPv6 IMO has room for such actions.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
An extension to TCP/IP is needed, where each packet contains a flag stating that it should not enter US-governed networks.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
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.
Correctamundo. There is only one answer for increasing communications freedom and it has nothing to do with an EU network.
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.
Bah, now you're straying well off-topic. Let's try this: The way to make communications free for the people (as in speech, not beer -- though that too) is to promote mesh networking and end-to-end, opportunistic encryption. She wants a more centralized network, which will have the opposite effect to promoting freedom. What we need is complete decentralization, with routing based not on a web of force, but a web of trust. Merkel is only interested in a web of lies.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Even Merkel's cell phone was reportedly monitored by American spies.
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.
Those two statements don't go together.
[Merkel] wants control over what information is coming into her area of reign
She can already pretty much control whatever is coming in, thanks to the routers that do the I/O with Germany. I think what she wants is to control what's going out...
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
What difference does it make whether the US gets European tax information? What do you think they are going to do with it?
And what country do you think is "more reliable"? France, Sweden, Germany, etc.? Don't make me laugh. Their surveillance and espionage against their own citizens and each other has been known for decades.
...of a network to exploit which is not subject to US regulation and controls currently being put into place with respect to their operations on domestic networks.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
How do you control VPNs and Onion routing without heavy filtering that can hardly be hidden?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
All hail the new EU central committee that will govern our lives.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
There is a third choice. Data pollution. What I really want is a program that doesn't require me to do it manually - entering in false "tags", random "birthdates", and randomly searching for consumer items I don't necessarily have interest in. Antiphorm was evidently a program developed to do something like this, but it disappeared.
Cookie camouflage, digital haystacks, bitshit, there must be a lot of names for it. Nature almost never evolves invisibility, but evolves camouflage. I haven't been able to interest any programmers in developing this, but think it could just be as simple as a browser hunting forms online and populating them with garbage.
"We all have a civil obligation to generate false data." - Spartacus, 71 BC
Gently reply
...because a "pan European" anything isn't really going to be secure at all. All the NSA will have to do is pay someone in a financially desperate state to let them plug-in to their "secure" pan-European connection.
-Styopa
Internet routing doesn't respect geographical location. If you can't trust your internet connection even without knowing the route it takes, then you can't trust it at all. Everything must be encrypted.
Of course, our politicians don't actually want to protect our privacy; they just want to be the only ones listening.
I would rather be spied in EU , by people I can vote against, protest against, or revolt against, rather than by the we-like-to-kill-people-with-the-wrong-metadata-with-drone spying bunch against which I do not vote, and have no chance to protest or revolt against.
So : "go europe ! Build that network and root server !". and "go fuck yourself US & ICANN".
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
They all spy. All this is for is to give government more control over their people, under the guise of 'privacy'.
If your 'local internet' is isolated, its pretty hard to see what the rest of the world is doing, or let the rest of the world see how badly you are treating your people.
"Digital Curtain"
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The French have suggested "Project Maginot 2.0". They propose to build some really big firewall routers, here X, here X and here X. Take that USA! hah hah!
I'm afraid that YOU forgot how the internet works. Creating a new, separated internet is far easier than you might think. The EU only needs to establish its own ICANN (a DNS and IP assignment root authority) and all of a sudden EU citizens will navigate in their own internet. There's no need to change physical networks, protocols, software or hardware.
And even if they wanted to physically separate the two networks, it would be very easy: they would just cut the transatlantic fiber optic cables. Then, if american companies wanted their own services and websites to be avaliable to EU citizens, they'd have to establish datacenters in the EU and comply with european laws. It a 500-million-consumer market, they'll accept that.
"Whenever Merkel makes a comment, I instantly wonder what her real intentions are. "
Secrecy is not one of them, since she illegally used a private, unencrypted Party-cellphone to do state-business on.
A 12 year old could have listened in, no NSA or spy-sites needed.
Not concerned about privacy and blanket, warrant-less surveillance? Better hope that the algorithms the security agencies use to identify the "bad guys" are infallible.
As much as it pains me to observe this, but due to the 'special relationship' having the UK on board will mean that everything is tapped by the US anyhow.
These people are in la la land if they think they can build a giant communications network that the NSA wont be able to crack into.
"We must hold the just balance and set ourselves as resolutely against improper corporate influence on the one hand, as
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...
Are you serious? Germany does not have the power to shutdown such locations. We are still being occupied by the U.S. military.
The interesting thing is that (as far as I know) this won't stop the flow of metadata and intercepts towards the NSA. Why not? Well, I believe that each and every EU country has bilateral deals with the US to share raw data in bulk. The British, the French, the Dutch, the Danes, the Germans (!), the Italians, the Spaniards, and the Polish. And err who else matters over there?
They're doing this for approximately the same reason as Singapore and Korea do it: they need the assistance of the US. Read: their security services want intercept data from parts of the communication network they can't monitor but the US can. So they do a deal: they give the US the intercept data (and metadata) they have access to in return for intercept data they don't have access to.
Therefore metadata and intercepts from all over the globe will continue to flow towards the NSA with the consent of those EU countries. Germany included.
What might happen though is that they'll be able to negotiate a better deal with the US is they act together than by having a lot of bilateral deals.
Could someone please tell Merkel?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Of course it's interconnected. There is no plan to change that.
It's more encouraging servers to be placed in Europe and making sure there aren't any 'funny' routes where data moving between points in Europe takes a detour through Langely.
Merkel is from the former GDR, and is a prime example of what they used to call a "Wendehals" there - someone who will turn his head (and opinion) into whatever direction is favorable at the moment. Her ability to quickly adapt to public sentiment is what kept her in power so long (and the fact that she ruthlessly gets rid of potential competitors, by "promoting" them away and/or "waiting" for them to fall to some scandal or the other).
So I'll believe it when I see it and not a second earlier. Words are cheap.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If we are all on every FBI watchlist, ever, we are Spartacus.
Gently reply
I'm actually working on transnational projects where UK/DE mixed crew outperforming eastern colleagues was so obvious, that management has given up on the idea.
Anyway, if servers would need to be physically located in EU, they will have to have EU crew to support them.
The Internet is being killed by its own successes, and it deserves to die by fragmentation, and it will because of spying and how easy spying is on it. It has several single points of access by intelligence agencies and they can be made to work much harder to achieve their goals. At the same time this response will kill the business and spam schemes, and they deserve to die too. Death to Google and Facebook and lots of other organizations that have had to much power to intrude and manipulate. There are ways to make life hard on the bad guys, but you and I have to get used to different behavior in our networks to achieve this. We have to put up with delay in order to be safer, and we have to deal with less connectivity in order to be more private. This is the future.
You might think that fragmentation favors state censorship, and it will as long as the topology is as static as it is now at the large scale, but it doesn't have to be. What is needed is a way to have much more dynamic routing, so it is hard to determine, meshes and store and forward technology with acceptance of latency is one way to allow for that. Privacy and security for individuals may require the end of the always-on Internet and it may need delayed gratification for more precious content to reach its target securely and privately.
It is pretty hard to spy on the sneaker net. What if even our wired communications become more like sneaker nets?
Me too, with your own boys vetting you at least you understand the culture and the values. A concern with the current way of working is that as a European the NSA could decide that you're an enemy of the state and you'd be picked up at boarder control when trying to enter the USA; then you're over there with an almost impossible task of getting out. Nobody would know you've been picked up, you'd just disappear.