

Germany Minister of Justice demands immediate response to US spying on Germany - oellegaard
http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=da&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dr.dk%2FNyheder%2FUdland%2F2013%2F06%2F30%2F0630124247.htm&act=url

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qwertzlcoatl
I'll repeat a comment I just made in another thread but find to be fitting
here too. For the sake of awareness:

It's funny to see all this railing up against NSA and PRISM, while tomorrow,
the first of July 2013, the "Bestandsdatenauskunft" will be implemented as law
in Germany. A commentator from _Die Zeit_ newspaper tersely summed up the
intentionally abstruse wording of the new rules. The law means, “that police
and intelligence services will in the future be allowed to obtain extremely
personal information about mobile phone users, and do so with the press of a
button and without having to face any major legal hurdles”.

Crudely translated it would mean something similar to "Inventory Data
Information Act". Parts of the new law are the following:

> With respect to the obligations of the access providers, ISPs with more than
> 100,000 customers are now required to maintain a “secure electronic
> interface” in order to minimise the time needed for certain agencies to
> retrieve information.

The innocuous sounding term, “inventory data”, should not detract from the
fact that the issue involves direct access to people’s private lives. “Not
only names, addresses and bank account details will be sent to the police. But
also the PINs of the mobile phones, and passwords blocking e-mail inboxes and
accessing services like Dropbox and dynamic IP addresses”, warned Die Zeit .

Proper english article (I don't know about this source in general, but this
one is accurate):
[https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/04/11/germ-a11.html](https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/04/11/germ-a11.html)

Google translated german articles:

 _Die Zeit_ :
[http://translate.google.de/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=_...](http://translate.google.de/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.zeit.de%2Fdigital%2Fdatenschutz%2F2013-03%2Fbestandsdaten-
breyer-bundestag)

 _Der Spiegel_ :
[http://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=htt...](http://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.spiegel.de%2Fnetzwelt%2Fnetzpolitik%2Fnrw-
beschwor-horrorszenarien-fuer-bestandsdatenauskunft-a-899421.html)

 _Netzpolitik.org_ :
[http://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=htt...](http://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fnetzpolitik.org%2F2013%2Fwie-
fur-die-bestandsdatenauskunft-getrickst-wurde%2F)

The debate about this is astonishing mute on its own, but compared to the NSA,
PRISM and TEMPORA public outcry, the debate about the Bestandsdatenauskunft is
basically non-existent at the moment.

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AJ007
The position of the US could be summarized as, make it easy for us to spy on
everyone, make it hard for everyone else. Maximum data for us, minimal data
for the rest. While other governments decry spying, naturally they have the
incentive to be even more invasive.

Since I was a small child, everyone joked about the NSA listening to US
citizen's phone calls. What is unusual about today is now the technology
exists to save the communications data forever and organize it in a manner
that produces meaningful facts.

Unfortunately we have ended up with a data cold war, where all governments are
spying on everyone all of the time. It is logical for the US government to
embrace encryption use by Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc, because they are able
to access that data that foreign governments can not. I imagine Google's
escalating implementations of user security relate directly to international
spying activity.

As such, we should expect more spying by everyone, in an escalating manner. In
less democratic societies, expect the result of unlimited blackmail,
espionage, and murder.

The only alternative we have left for a free society are open source
communication platforms that employ user-side encryption. (Sorry Silent
Circle.)

~~~
ihsw
> a data cold war, where all governments are spying on everyone

One of the least discussed topics in this whole cyber-security fiasco is the
issue of the exploit industry: hackers and hacker collectives buy, sell, and
trade software exploits between each-other and state governments.

This flies in the face of actual security in that software corporations and
state governments purchase exploits in order to buy a hacker's silence
(preventing the sale the same exploit to competitors) or clandestine
operations. How do you think the NSA (et al) hacked into various computer
systems across the world? They've got a stockpile of zero-day exploits.

This stockpile of zero-day exploits is similar to the previous cold war's
stockpile of nuclear warheads: it reinforces MAD (mutually-assured
destruction). We lived through a little over half a century under the fear of
nuclear warfare, do we want to endure the same threat in the 21st century?

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virtu
It will be interesting to see if this dele ted Guardian article holds some
water, then the Minister of Justice will have a long face too:

[http://pastebin.com/NTJvUZdJ](http://pastebin.com/NTJvUZdJ)

~~~
PavlovsCat
I also have to wonder how much of this is posturing for the German public. As
long as they stomp their tiny feet a little, who can blame them, right? They
have nothing to do with this, they're just as outraged as everybody. And then
they can use all this for new, even better election promises.

Am I too cynical? I think what I am asking is, does she demand an explanation
like Obama demanded Guantanamo to be closed and whistleblower laws to be
strengthened?

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Udo
You're not wrong. Our current ruling party has never been actually opposed to
surveillance and is not really strong on privacy (to say the least). However,
I think besides collecting cheap points with the German public, there is
another factor behind this "stomping of tiny feet" as you call it:

Germany is somewhat of an economic powerhouse, but paradoxically radical
innovation is culturally frowned-upon. This means that German tech is usually
not ground-breaking but incrementally-improved-to-death (by heavyweight
scientists with a lot of clout). Since there is reason to believe that a large
part of all this spying is simply industrial espionage on behalf of big US
companies, I believe the German government is afraid the local industry will
quickly lose even more ground than it already has. Since innovation in this
country doesn't move very fast, the damage would be long-lasting and
potentially devastating.

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blablabla123
My forecast is that many tech people will move away from public Cloud and host
stuff themselves. Also German Cloud service provider will have an easier life
getting customers... Eventhough this is private usage, in the long run it will
also affect how people choose technical solutions in their day to day jobs.

Therefore I think the U.S. has an interest to seek a solution that Germany and
other countries with significant economy are happy with.

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rtpg
Is there really anything surprising with the notion that the US is spying on
other country's official businesses? Did people think that the surveillance
apparatus just disappeared with the Berlin wall?

I also wonder why people who are committing to official business aren't having
everything encrypted anyways. I don't know how technically difficult it is to
encrypt phone calls, but I can't imagine it being that hard.

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JoeCoo7
Are you serious? This is not wiretapping a single individual or group. They
are spying on ALL people in Germany and violate the German constitution, and
if the gov of Germany is involved (which is probably the case) this gets even
worse.

I wonder about all those people which think its normal/not surprising. I bet
you had not the slightest idea about the scale of NSA spying. NSA even
compromised EU offices and there is probably more to come. This reminds me of
Cold War and allies should not be treated like that.

By the way the German federal prosecution office has now stated its collecting
data about the NSA spying
([http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/bundesanwaltschaft...](http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/bundesanwaltschaft-
ueberprueft-nsa-ueberwachung-a-908617.html)). NSA spying gets lots of media
coverage now, this might also turn the tides in the upcoming election. Good
luck pirate party!

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AlexeiSadeski
Of course it's normal, and of course "we" are not surprised y the scale of NSA
spying. What did you think the NSA did if not this? Have all of their 40,000
employees listening in on Bin Laden's phone calls?

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ExpiredLink
He pretends he didn't know?

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OGC
As a German, tell me when there's a statement saying "We are doing this, this
and that" instead of "we demand".

