[governance] Germany: New Basic Right to Privacy of Computer

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

Ralf Bendrath [29/02/08 15:20 +0100]:
> FYI, an important landmark ruling that created a new fundamental right 
> related to computer privacy. Front page headlines all over the place in 
> Germany. :-)

It is a crying shame that the privacy and law enforcement groups are at
loggerheads to this extent in Germany.

Several previous judgements, such as the 2005 Holger Voss case forbidding
ISPs to log data about their customers except for billing purposes (and by
extension not at all for fixed rate internet connections) tends to
hamstring ISPs looking to trace actual abusers on their systems - spam,
ddos attacks, etc.

If I had a dollar for every time I had autoreplies from German ISPs to say
"contact your law enforcement, they will contact our LE, who will contact
us and we will start to log data on this case" - by which time of course,
whatever source of abuse is long gone, or the ddos or whatever issue exists
is well past being a minor threat, I would probably retire rich.

Privacy and security have to coexist. And a lot of law enforcement work
actually targets real malefactors, and logging + the backing of a good
privacy framework and a system to issue (and in some case, expedite)
warrants, is essential.

The EU article 29 working party, and a lot of these german court decisions
fly in the face of the reality ISPs, and law enforcement personnel, have to
work with .. the reality that while absolute privacy and anonymity is
something to be valued, there are far more malefactors abusing this than
(say) political dissidents etc actually using it to its max [and backing it
with strong cryptography].

	suresh
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