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
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.
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.
When you are threatened by a great evil that wants all data you have, your choices are to firewall yourself off or surrender.
This is true on both micro or macro scale, and we have discussions on how to protect our data on micro scale here on slashdot all the time. It's quite sad that when people view it as "well it's our evil guy" suddenly massive theft of data becomes completely justified and counter measures undesirable.
Because... why? The US government can do very little to a European citizen.
If you're European, it's the European organizations that can wreck your life.
The U.S. can do very much to an European citizen. Putting him on a no-fly list. Outbidding his company by tipping his bids to their own company. Stealing trade secrets and contract details to competitors. Damaging his reputation by disclosing secrets he has to keep to interesting parties. Letting some accidental data breach happen.
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."
May I remind you of projects like LiMux, which involved bringing the entire Infrastructure of the city of Munich over from Microsoft products to open source products based on and around Linux?
Projects that instead of failing, succeeded quite well. Where the users -- after an initial grumbling -- not only accepted it, but gave it quite better usability marks than the MS products. Users that are governmental offices, who are not exactly known for quickly embracing new ideas. In a federal state that's Germany's equivalent of Texas in terms of conservativeness.
So given that this project quite nicely showed that going away from the US Software companies, over to truly international Open Source software is very much feasible, even when you're just using the money you'd have spent on licensing costs anyway year-over-year, what's exactly the holdup?
Also, before you raise the flag of "lowered productivity", the entire switch-over happened progressively, without impacting users beyond them having to learn a few new clicks and buttons.
Now, avoiding US-based internet services is also not that hard.
This list goes on and one; at least for Europe. Therefore, ignoring US services is only a matter of overcoming complacency, not one of sheer impossibility.
The U.S. can do very much to an European citizen. Putting him on a no-fly list. Outbidding his company by tipping his bids to their own company. Stealing trade secrets and contract details to competitors. Damaging his reputation by disclosing secrets he has to keep to interesting parties. Letting some accidental data breach happen.
Yes, I'm sure those things will have an impact on 99% of all EU citizens... Since we all regularly fly to the US doing business versus US competitors. Not.
Your own government doing this is much more dangerous than any other government: google "schleppnetzfahndung" and "berufsverbot" for nice examples of Germany in the 70's versus the trade unions, dissidents, journalists... they ruined the reputation of hundreds of thousands of people who just didn't toe the line. And it didn't just happen in Germany, lots of examples of EU governments doing stuff like that. Hell, the Greek government only recently removed the requirement that your religion has to be on the passport.
I'm not a fan of what the NSA has been doing, but let's be clear here: it was with full knowledge and cooperation of most EU intelligence services.
Socialists say: "the enemy is at home". I find that to be more prophetic every time I read the news, lately.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
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
This is all right and fine, but I was just saying that the NSA can't do anything against an E.U. citizen is plainly wrong (and a little naive).