And so we bid a sad farewell to Caminogate
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Germany's supreme court rules data retention law unconstitutional
ACCORDING TO Der Spiegel, Germany's most powerful court has rejected the country's law on data retention.
The report says that the controversial law was rejected outright and was overturned by the court, thereby limiting law enforcement agencies' access to data.
Now, rather than keep data about telephone calls and email traffic for six months, German organisations and authorities will have to destroy it just as soon as they collect it. And the reason why? Because the German court said it cannot trust these organisations to look after it.
The court ruled that all data stored to date must be deleted immediately. Furthermore, it said the law went far beyond the requirements of the EU directive. The storage of data could "cause a diffusely threatening feeling of being under observation that can diminish an unprejudiced perception of one's basic rights in many areas," explained the president of the court, Hans-Jürgen Papier.
"The court demanded that stricter conditions be attached to the use and storage of the data, saying it needed to be encoded and that there should be 'transparent control' of what the information was used for," the German newspaper added.
We hope the British government is reading. µ
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The German judge who decided this case really and truly got it right. He sees the "big picture" and is able to weigh personal liberties against the need for national security. The telcoms cannot be trusted with this data and there is no safeguard against the data being misappropratiated or tampered with. Further, knowledge that all your data is being retained does create a pervasive apprhension into every area of an individuals life. I am certain the German citizenry breathed a collective sigh of relief at this news.
I WISH THE US GOVERNMENT WOULD TAKE NOTICE OF THIS DECISION. The US gov hoovers up as much information as it can in the name of national security. Who knows what they actually do with it or what safeguards are in place to protect it. Heck, I'm supposed to be living in the land of freedom but I find myself scared to crticize my government in this post. How ironic.
this is only to protect powerfull politicians in order they can not be persecuted legaly for their illegal activities... Berlusconi in Italy is fighting to have the same law adopted as otherwise they have so many telefon conversations recorded to send him and half of italian parlament to jail forever
Mass action, everyone put a wifi booster in your loft and run open wifi....there you go government officials pick the bones out of who is doing what now.
I suspect it's a glitch.. maybe a wrinkle.. that will be ironed to reduce the irony. Thanks for headlining this item. It great when the courts work like they say in the text books: balance of power and so on.
At present the buzz with the networking arena is IF-MAP (developed by the Trusted Information Group) which allows networking vendors to export Meta data to a central server.
ie. a user connecting to the internet, is authenticated by their ISP authentication server (user_id, time), their IP and MAC is assigned by the DHCP server which also provides (IP, MAC and time) to the IF-MAP server. The ISP's firewall can query the IF-MAP server to retrieve user_id, ip, mac and report back to the IF-MAP server (destination IP, port and application being used). The IF-MAP server does not store information long term is it a cache that can be updated by any device. It is the firewall that will record the info for the government. Its a pity this has not be pointed out before.
Why's that Efros?
When we are looking to our Teutonic neighbours for help in matters of civil liberties.
Send the ruling to North America. The US of A is heading where Germany doesn't want to go because of past issues. Its all about never having to go and experience what Europe went through in the 1930. The American constitution is being shredded piece by piece and the Americans can see it happening and their talking about it. Problem is the younger genx are going around saying "Well DUH, what can we do about it" and then they go back to playing Video games.
that since the law hasn't been thrown out, they're only delaying to reduce that pesky "perception" of the people that we're being spied on. An only too typical PR pattern of starting outrageous, making a show of trimming back after protest, then in secret implementing even worse than publicly announced.
It seems that one part of Germany's authorities are happy to express a blunt opinion on another part.
Here in the UK it's still all one big Establishment, so the politicians get away with passing crazy laws and no one powerful enough will come out and say things like "you have a long track-record in losing important data - you therefore cannot be trusted with this".
One day there's going to be a catastrophic data loss that really hurts people and some emergency committee brought in to dissect the remains of the situation will tell the government of the day that the way forward is to switch to paper records kept in a great big concrete warehouse on a secure site.