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."
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.
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"
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."
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
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?
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?
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.
Spying on this level isn't needed for when secret services "take an interest in somebody". There already are mechanisms for the authorities to wiretap you if they're concerned with you directly. There's no need to wiretap the entire net for that.
No, the purpose of such things is to assemble large databases of things like who talks to who, and for those purposes, you are of interest to secret services, as is everybody else. Let's say a friend of yours participates in some sort of environmental activism. Well, you both communicate, and that automatically makes you a person of interest.
to the problem of what the NSA is doing. And if an organization does it within Europe, what then?
There's also the problem that hard outer shells tend to have a very tepid time protecting networks of nontrivial size if the stuff inside is still all soft and squishy.
You aren't going to run a network the size of Europe, or even part of it, without almost anybody who cares having a few listening stations set up, and if you plan on extending your EuroNet to anybody except specific state functionaries sending secure email to one another, you'll still have loads of users chattering with servers outside your shiny new network.
Is it probably a good idea not to use US cloud services corporations if you don't want the Americans watching you? Sure. Are the subsequent steps markedly more difficult? Oh definitely.
(Plus, the UK is a longstanding double-plus Freedom Buddy, and Germany has long been quite cooperative, so we'll see if they can find enough countries not collaborating with the US to even fill out a network...)
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
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)