Hacker News Reader

Comment by lignuist | Hacker News Reader

Well, I read: Germany wants a German internet to be able to better spy on its citizens.

Germanys government really did absolutely nothing to protect the privacy of German people in the past and deserves the same amount of trust as the US government.

The mentioned encrypted mail-service is actually legally backdoored. If they were interested in enhancing privacy, they would support the development of open standards like GPG. Instead they are trying to force people to install closed source software for their tax declaration, which is probably spyware.

Sorry, nothing good to expect in Germany.

Edit: The german government seems to have supported GPG in 1999.

(second reference in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnupg)

View on HN

Makes me think of the time the CCC reverse engineered a trojan used by the German police.

http://ccc.de/en/updates/2011/staatstrojaner

The German government financially supports the gnupg project, but I guess that didn't fit into your agenda.

I was not aware of that and have no problem with admitting that I'm wrong if I was, but the only source that I can find for that is from 1999. So are they really still supporting GPG?

I suppose by the same token the US government funds the Tor Project. I wasn't aware that the German government funded GPG though, that's incredibly interesting.

The US government also supports the Tor project, for instance. It's not as if they're one single-minded entity.

But as a German I have to say overall lignuist is right: there is no reason to trust the German government (or the EU for that matter) any more than the US government.

This "German internet" idea seems familiar somehow, because here in Germany we're used to have a German or Germanized version of everything. You can forget about normal Germans ever using an English website, it has to be at least translated if not re-branded. German people by and large do not watch English TV or movies, they expect everything to be translated and somewhat culturally re-branded. Combine that with existing separatist and isolationist movements, which by the way have always played a part in the inofficial German mindset, I can see this exceedingly stupid idea seriously gaining ground.

On a meta level, I think you're overusing the word agenda here to create a polemic atmosphere where none was warranted. Agenda implies that someone wants to bring across a piece of propaganda, disregarding the facts if necessary. What lignuist is doing is called having an opinion. You may disagree with it, but that does not make it an agenda.

On the other hand Germans might be saying 'They might be snooping bds but at least they're our snooping bds'.

Actually I would prefer to be snooped on by a foreign country, because they have less influence on me.

I'm not so sure. I think these guys are all in it together ("Hey, could you spy on our citizens and let us know if there are any terrorists? We're not allowed to do it").

In a democracy, I'd rather that the actual snooping was done by my own government, as (theoretically) I could do something about it. I can file a lawsuit, or elect new representatives.

Not that this always works, but at least it's something.

I've made the same argument before: Fear the power closest to you.

I have little to fear from the US or China spying on me because they have (realistically, discounting e.g. Seal Team Six) much less control over me than the Irish government. But that only holds true because I'm not travelling to the US and I'm not doing anything they'd care^ about. If I was doing something that the US government cared about, then it doesn't really matter where I am.

^ i.e., illegal, dangerous, hostile etc. FYI: I'm a boring regular guy

Germany has many secret police's individual landers have them as well this woudl be like Texas or Yorkshire having its own equivalent of MI5.

There is also the scandal of Germanys police secret and normal missing a hard right terrorist group that killed several people - of course they where not ethnic Germans they killed which makes you wonder

Revealed during hearings in a Munich court, the hidden life of Beate Zschäpe, a mousy, bespectacled 38-year-old with the looks of a librarian, has given Germany a chilling insight into the clandestine workings of its neo-Nazi movement.

In the biggest home-grown terrorist scandal since the days of the Baader Meinhof gang in the 1970s, her group is accused of carrying out ten murders, two bombings and 15 bank robberies during a 13-year campaign.

Worse still, Germany's police and spy agencies thought that the killings, dubbed the "kebab murders" because they targeted mainly Turkish immigrants, were part of a feud within the Turkish mafia.

On Thursday, a parliamentary report into how Miss Zschäpe's gang went undetected branded the affair a "a humiliating defeat" for the German security services, saying that they had "dramatically underestimated" the neo-Nazi threat. Her trial has also cast a shadow over next month's elections, with the chancellor, Angela Merkel, pondering the darker side of the German psyche during a visit last week to the Dachau concentration camp, just outside Munich.

"How could Germans go so far as to deny people human dignity and the right to live based on their race, religion, political persuasion or sexual orientation?" she asked, standing on a plaza where Dachau inmates once assembled daily for roll call.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/102...

Germany has no secret police. Germany has intelligence agencies and there is one "Landesamt fuer Verfassungsschutz" (State Authority for the Protection of the Constitution) in each german state (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_of_Germany) and one coordinating "Bundesamt fuer Verfassungsschutz" (Federal State Authority for the Protection of the Constitution). None of these has any police authority, e.g. if they want to arrest you they have to go to the police, a judge has to allow your arrest and then you can get arrested - by the police.

The last secret police in Germany was the Ministry for State Security (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi) in East Germany. The last secret police for Germany in whole was the Gestapo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestapo) - we've wised up after that and decided to stop mixing intelligence agencies and police.

I was using the general term but compared then to MI5 so it was obvious that I did not mean a stasi style organization.

Even so I was very concerned that local government has its own Intelligence Agencys and i take a more relaxed relaxed view over the NSA and GCHQ than most HN commentators

There are several different things going on and people seem to mix them together.

1. Governments spying other governments and foreign companies.

2. Government mass surveillance of their citizens, and citizens of other countries if possible.

3. Government using the Internet to target some small subset of their citizens.

While these of course are different thing, do you think that they are not related?

They are technologically related but you can't address them in same ethical framework.

For one thing, I think classical spying between governments is just good thing. Knowing what other sovereign actors do and think without filters removes suspicion. Government officials getting spied on just shows incompetence from those go spied and they should up their game. I think security agencies in many countries will now update their policies and get funding for doing so. It's also better understood outside intelligence communities that everyone outside Five Eye countries is considered outsider.

Also. Mass surveillance of citizens is very different from targeted surveillance of small number of suspects. Mass surveillance changes the power balance in democracy. Targeted surveillance of select number of people fits into normal intelligence work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com