Pretty shocking in a state that has such strict privacy laws. Not sure how the two can come from the same mouth, and even be in public view.
My understanding is that the privacy restrictions are largely the result of half the country having lived under the Statsi, and thus being extremely weary of government eyes. Here it’s out in the open!
>Pretty shocking in a state that has such strict privacy laws. Not sure how the two can come from the same mouth, and even be in public view.
Because they're not necessarily contradictory. This doesn't just give secret services a blank cheque to spy on everyone, it just provides intelligence agencies with a tool.
I'm German and I don't object in principle to the fact that intelligence, under supervision of the government, has the ability to say, infiltrate criminal networks using software like this. Under certain circumstances the police was always able to wiretap a phone, I don't see the difference here other than this taking into account the changing circumstances of internet communication.
Also from a cultural standpoint if anything people in Germany are more sceptic of erosion of privacy by private power than by the state, we're not the US. The former is pretty much unconstrained, the latter is so tightly limited in scope by law it's not really a practical issue. The scary thing about the Stasi wasn't that they were inteliigence, every country has intelligence officers who can bug someone's home, it was that the GDR was an autocratic regime.
The scary stuff about the current development is, that we get flooded with arguments about hardcore criminals, but if you look at the actual changes to the laws, such restrictions are not made, instead these extreme measures are allowed for petty reasons and some politicians will still keep pushing for even more totalitarianism. These siloviki want mass surveillance comparable to what Chinas Ministry of State Security or USAs National Security Agency have. It does not matter if Germany is not ruled by an autocratic regime at the moment, once such systems are in place, it will be.
> It does not matter if Germany is not ruled by an autocratic regime at the moment
I totally get the appeal of that argument, but it completely breaks down once I ask myself how much that autocratic bogeyman regime, once it got into power, would feel bound by privacy protections put in place by their predecessors.
The question is rather: can they use preestablished structures and machinery or do they need to build it from the ground up. Surveilance also needs work, and its less work if everything is prepared.
my point was more: any liberal social democratic society that subjects itself to every increasing censorship and surveillance will devolve towards totalitarianism.
Totalitarianism has been the mode of human governance since prehistory. It's great, effective, and always tempting. The Western world today is the exception, not the rule.
It's also really hard to establish or continue without the surveillance to detect rebellion and corruption.
It makes a big difference, actually. Few regimes go full-on totalitarian right away - it's more common to have a gradual erosion, where they operate within the letter of the law for a while, while gradually diminishing the spirit. So the more the letter allows, the more abuse you'll see from the get go.
The surveillance, including the mass surveillance of the communication, existed even in older times. It is, for example, documented that both British and US secret services went through all the telegrams that passed their commercial infrastructure, often based on a simple "gentleman's agreement" with the companies, even in the 19th century, and certainly in the 20th.
Other countries were somehow aware of that weakness of telegrams, and the practice of attempting to use some code for telegram messages existed even then.
Back in the age of feudalism the holy roman emperor, who was neither holy, nor roman, nor an emperor, but the head of the House of Habsburg, gave the monopoly of postal services as an hereditary title to the House of Thurn und Taxis who had been building their postal services for two centuries, eliminating their competition in the empire, under the rule that letters are read and checked for conspiracy against the crown. That happened in black rooms, or cabinet noir or Geheime Kanzlei and became common in all of europe. In the 17th century the "Wiener Postloge" for example was well known for their efficiency not only in opening, copying and re-sealing letters by forging wax-seals, but also for their state of the art crypto-analysis.</history>
It's a trope that "sounds good" but IMHO doesn't get one more knowledge.
a) It was de facto an empire, but with an emperor allowing huge independence to the local rulers. So he was an emperor, even if he couldn't do "anything anytime".
"The power of the emperor was limited, and while the various princes, lords, bishops, and cities of the empire were vassals who owed the emperor their allegiance, they also possessed an extent of privileges that gave them de facto independence within their territories. " (1)
b) It was "holy" in the sense of "Christian" and in the sense of getting weaker due to the "holy wars" raging even between the parts of the empire.
c) the "roman" could be the most disputed, but it reflects the millenniums-long belief of what the "real" empire is supposed to be, namely, the one that is the successor of the rulers by which we name two months in a year even today.
The trope's origin is Voltaire. His influence on the beliefs of the western world must be acknowledged, but it must be recognized that he wrote a lot with the intention of changing them (and some changes were even bigger than he accepted).
"For the historian, Voltaire's famous quip has three aspects: 1) What did Voltaire mean by it in 1756 when he wrote the line in his Essay on Customs? 2) How did contemporaries, including the Austrian Habsburgs, understand it? 3) Does the quote accurately describe the events the Philosophe is discussing (Charles IV of Bohemia and the Golden Bull of 1356)? Voltaire in fact exaggerates the weakness of the Empire in both 1356 and 1756, and uses an anachronistic standard to evaluate both: the quasi nation states of the 1750s. The three parts of the imperial title had changed in meaning during the four centuries after 1356. The jibe nonetheless reflects something of the thought of Voltaire and the French Enlightenment."
Sure, but a police operation surely could attempt to swap the book cipher out for a compromised one, no?
I think the idea that communication ought to be categorically out of reach of intelligence is very novel. I don't think it was even conceivable decades ago that, with legal justification, intelligence could not hack or be completely locked out of the communication of some network. For criminals who are savy enough, tech has made it much harder, not easier for the government to do their job.
I think there is also a very paradoxical side-effect. A harmstrung government may resort to outsourcing its intelligence work. I read a story about private firms in the US collecting license plate information and selling it back to the police. Clearview AI is certainly another example. If the agencies are limited, there is a real chance of both ineffective policing and a huge unregulated surveillance grey market. I would rather equip the government with enough capacity, but strong legal checks.
Legal checks are a mile-long leash, no matter how strong the cord. This is exchanging freedom for security, since a backdoor like this doesn’t require breaking glass.
There is something hilarious and schizoid in how Germany is perceived and the realities about this country.
They have strict privacy laws? First Nazi personel in the first half then Stasi personel in the second half of the 20th century were simply requalified and rehired, each bloody time. How do you think?
They are top environmentally-friendly country? Highest polluting coal power plants in EU are located in Germany.
These are both known and highly controversial issues in Germany. The first one is widely accepted as without any alternative. You can't just replace a whole bureaucracy and in retrospect it worked out to only change key positions. But obviously it was a healing and cleaning process over time. The other thing is to be attributed to the fact the we were very quick to abandon atomic power even before climate change issues were that popular. Its a hilarious contradiction. We now actually also have a plan to also get rid of the coal power plants but it will be hard, maybe we need to reintroduce the candle as a source of light. There is no lack of willingness and intent but reality has us all in its tight grip.
Nazis were indeed rehired to senior positions, but sensitive parts of the civil service were purged of Stasi operatives, although this did take a long time, especially in Saxony. There has been some resentment of the fact that this often meant that the civil service in Eastern states is dominated by 'Wessies'.
Obviously, the OP was talking about the perception of Germany today and I think we can safely assume that no Ex-Nazi personnel is currently working at the German secret service. And coming to think of it, why wouldn't someone whose qualified to spy on others be rehired to do the same job in Germany after the end of GDR? What do you think secret services do?
Regarding "environmentally friendly", this point is correct but you're omitting that Germany just recently passed a law to get out of coal until 2038. The energy produced in Germany will then be pretty much exclusively renewable which is not a small feat for a country with such a large population.
> Hilarious and schizoid are adjectives that I would assign to your post.
Sorry but you are rude.
> I think we can safely assume that no Ex-Nazi personnel is currently working at the German secret service
Stasi personel though?
Are you expecting that people using such nuanced and subtle techniques like Zersetzung against domestic population [1] will suddently become ethical towards anyone they perceive as threat? or as undesirable?
On the facade Germans get some show off initiatives (no Street View!), behind the scenes is business as usual.
Yes, you are right. I apologize, I clearly went overboard.
> Stasi personel though? [...]
I think it's just an over-generalization. Just because you worked for the Stasi automatically makes you a bad fit for a certain job. It really depends.
You forgot the Nazi personal in the 2nd half. The BND is a NAZI organization. Lookup Gehlen. Didn't change much after they died, if you look at the various BND scandals since.
By no means. The Stasi was active in the GDR (German Democratic Republic, "East Germany"), and it is not as if those from the east are particularly watchful for state-instigated surveillance.
This predates the wall, but the wall only confirmed what was going on beforehand.
> Pretty shocking in a state that has such strict privacy laws
If viewed from the different perspective of government intrusion on tech, it can appear less shocking. A government encouraged by its citizenry to use its leverage over tech companies will continue to do so, and not always in the same ways.
Someone said that's a result of constant under-funding and treating your military with no respect - when it's only seen as a choice for those who can't "do any better", you'll get extremists among the ranks.
Sounds plausible, at least in the US soldiers seem to be highly respected and in turn, they respect the country and its people.
My understanding is that the privacy restrictions are largely the result of half the country having lived under the Statsi, and thus being extremely weary of government eyes. Here it’s out in the open!