Jens Meiert

Dark Days for Germany

Yesterday, on the historically significant November 9, the German government approved a law (PDF, 1,999 KB) that requires telecommunications providers to retain all customer communication data for a period of six months, and allowing authorities to gain access to stored communications including telephone calls, text messages and faxes. The law has been approved without considering arguments and resistance of many organizations and individuals, and without taking into account numerous studies that doubt the usefulness of the law.

While the Federal President, Horst Köhler, as well as the Federal Constitutional Court might still prevent the new law to become legally valid, it effectively suspects every German citizen to be a criminal or terrorist, at the same time limiting civil rights, including the right for privacy.

The consequences will be farreaching, and the development raises important questions, including: Where will this end?

The next measures may include the assessment of data security as spoofing, denouncing concerned citizens as criminals and terror suspects who could possibly be arrested without a judicial decision, punishing unimportant slips like accidentally clicking on the “wrong” search result, maybe even snooping population groups like our apparent role model, the US government, illustrated by intending to map muslims (doesn’t this remind us of something?). Then there is a strong probability of abuse, not only referring to international agreements that will allow for data exchange, but rather taking into account “true criminals” who might access the enormous personal data collections.

There are so many other things to be noted, whereas the impact of such a blind yet not populistic act is so big that it would mean the darkest chapter in Germany’s post-war history. Those people who doubt that should just ask themselves the above question again, where will this stop? Surveillance does not prevent anything; citing Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

My fellow countrymen might want to consider using remaining rights (as long as the Grundgesetz exists) and protesting against the new law as well as the development in general:

• Use the thing on your shoulders and open your mouth;
• support data retention initiatives and law suits;
• complain to the government parties CDU, CSU, and SPD;
• go to demonstrations and stand up for the rights of the German people;
• go to the polls if you don’t already, and vote differently (I left the CDU in September and now sympathize with the FDP);
• use other legal measures to show your concerns;
• all the more protect your personal data.

Just do something to prevent Germany’s “2014” horror scenario.

My involvement in a few projects already requires a different post frequency but I’ll continue to write regularly, maybe on a bi-weekly to monthly basis. The current political development is more important than any problem we face in professional web design though. It is crucial to do something.

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Comments

1. On November 10, 2007, 15:43 CET, johno said:

   Good piece of writing. This kind of knee-jerk reaction to imaginary and perceived threats is becoming all to common. In wartime such measures are understandable (though still not warranted)–but in the 21st century!

   Even “pacifist” Japan is now resorting to finger-printing and photographing all foreign visitors, and even long time residents who re-enter the country. Whatever next? Bar-coded at birth, no doubt….

2. On November 10, 2007, 19:12 CET, Andreas said:

   Thank you for this article, Jens. It would be great if more of the IT “star publishers” would use their popularity and their influence in the way you do and show that there is real world beyond CSS hacks and W3C standards!
   Allow me to add one point of concern to the things you mention in your article that has been totally neglected so far: even provided that the state authorities do not and never will misuse the stored data there is another risk, namely that of the data being stolen by criminals or sold by corrupt officials to companies or criminals.
   Remembering this year’s “hacker attacks” against servers and workstations of the German adminstration one can suspect that the data collected about everyone of us will not be very save. Especially because this year’s attacks were not very sophisticated at all but nevertheless successful!
   And this week the magazine “Spiegel” reported cases of highly confidential data collected by the police about left-wing activists having been passed to neonazis by corrupt officials.
   So: how do the authorities want to protect our data?

3. On November 16, 2007, 10:38 CET, Peter said:

   In Sweden we are moving in the same direction. All we can hope for now is that Ireland is successful in their case of reporting the illegal process of the directive to the European Court of Justice.

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