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Germany is planning a new law giving authorities the right to look at private messages and fingerprint children as young as 6, the interior minister said on Wednesday after the last government gathering before a national election in September.
Ministers from central government and federal states said encrypted messaging services, such as WhatsApp and Signal, allow militants and criminals to evade traditional surveillance.
"We can't allow there to be areas that are practically outside the law," interior minister Thomas de Maiziere told reporters in the eastern town of Dresden.
It's not even certain that messages will be obvious to be... anything like they don't want to. A quick look how this can be done is the movie "The Saint" from 1997 where the contractor gets jobs that way. The hard quote is "where authorities install software on phones to relay messages before they are encrypted". Suppose the phone contains nothing of value. Not even the destination for the message because another unit transmits this via a analog transmission junk voice modulated with the actual real bits.
This panopticon idea is incredibly stupid technology-wise and a dangerous setup of society. The last time themes like this were current, neighbors told people in Armani uniforms that so-and-so did bad things so they could snatch their belongings or houses for themselves. And the whole society went down the drain. Oh wait, actually it was repeated after the mustache times with the sickle times. Both failed. This also shows why bootloader locking computer phones is detrimental to real security for real users. Because without it, enforced and silent installation will be hard.
And as for the motivation behind these moves. For some mysterious reason Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech, Slovakia, and Hungary seem to have been spared the latest string of violent attacks. How can that be? Nobel prize awaits! ;)
(Score: 2) by quietus on Thursday June 15 2017, @10:24PM (2 children)
The proposal, coming from the Ministry of Interior Affairs, is about giving the police/security services a technical/legal capability of following electronic communications during a criminal inquiry.
Breaking the encryption protocols used by different messenger apps is off-the-table. The proposal is about giving police the capability to hack into a suspect's mobile or computer, and replace a selected app with its own, Trojan, version. These Staatstrojaner must be focused on a single app only, and may not hover up any data about the suspect's private life.
An earlier (2008) proposal posited that such Staatstrojaner might only be deployed in case of an imminent threat to an exceedingly important legal (read: State) asset. This new proposal (linky [gesetze-im-internet.de]), however, wants to deploy these Staatstrojaner in case of 38 different (suspected) criminal activities (drugs delicts, illegal sports betting, among them).
An expertise center for this kind of hacking activities, called Zitis [wikipedia.org], is in the works near Munich. Its budget for the year 2017 is 10 million euros, for 120 staff, expected to increase to about 400 staff by 2022.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 16 2017, @07:03AM (1 child)
Seems like they are exposing themselves for an arms race with hackers. A lot of trust will be lost. Trust our secure binary blob - hahaha don't think so. More people will treat the government as the enemy when they behave like one.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Friday June 16 2017, @01:32PM
The title of a Die Zeit editorial comment [www.zeit.de] on this is Die Kanone wird zur Standardwaffe (the cannon becomes the standard weapon [of police men/women]). The direct risk here is that once you put such a trojan on a mobile/computer, you effectively put it out in the wild. The only thing needed is a hacker group putting honeypot devices out. Next, these tools will be turned against the police themselves.
That being said, letting true criminals going scot free because you're unable/not allowed to follow their communications is a return to the law of the strongest, and wreaks havoc on society.