[governance] Germany: New Basic Right to Privacy of Computer
Ralf Bendrath
bendrath at zedat.fu-berlin.de
Fri Feb 29 10:02:38 EST 2008
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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