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

[Ralf Bendrath]

Suresh Ramasubramanian schrieb:
> 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.
I am afraid this is a natural conflict that is pretty well known in many 
countries. Since 2001, the law enforcement people have gained more and 
more intrusive competences. I think it is just fair that this time, the 
privacy groups have won. BTW: The recent decision protects us from covert 
searches of our entire hard drives. Now that is a different dimension than 
logging IP numbers; I guess we can agree on that.

> 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.
AFAIK there are a lot of ISPs here who do pretty well without logging
personal data.

> 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"
This is a perfect legal procedure that protects the rights of individuals. 
Sorry for the inconvenience, but I guess you can at least partially blame 
it on the content industry which really got on the ISP's nerves with 
gazillions of requests for logfile data.

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