Entries Tagged "Germany"

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New German Government is Pro-Encryption and Anti-Backdoors

I hope this is true:

According to Jens Zimmermann, the German coalition negotiations had made it “quite clear” that the incoming government of the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and the business-friendly liberal FDP would reject “the weakening of encryption, which is being attempted under the guise of the fight against child abuse” by the coalition partners.

Such regulations, which are already enshrined in the interim solution of the ePrivacy Regulation, for example, “diametrically contradict the character of the coalition agreement” because secure end-to-end encryption is guaranteed there, Zimmermann said.

Introducing backdoors would undermine this goal of the coalition agreement, he added.

I have written about this.

Posted on December 8, 2021 at 1:19 PMView Comments

On That Dusseldorf Hospital Ransomware Attack and the Resultant Death

Wired has a detailed story about the ransomware attack on a Dusseldorf hospital, the one that resulted in an ambulance being redirected to a more distant hospital and the patient dying. The police wanted to prosecute the ransomware attackers for negligent homicide, but the details were more complicated:

After a detailed investigation involving consultations with medical professionals, an autopsy, and a minute-by-minute breakdown of events, Hartmann believes that the severity of the victim’s medical diagnosis at the time she was picked up was such that she would have died regardless of which hospital she had been admitted to. “The delay was of no relevance to the final outcome,” Hartmann says. “The medical condition was the sole cause of the death, and this is entirely independent from the cyberattack.” He likens it to hitting a dead body while driving: while you might be breaking the speed limit, you’re not responsible for the death.

So while this might not be an example of death by cyberattack, the article correctly notes that it’s only a matter of time:

But it’s only a matter of time, Hartmann believes, before ransomware does directly cause a death. “Where the patient is suffering from a slightly less severe condition, the attack could certainly be a decisive factor,” he says. “This is because the inability to receive treatment can have severe implications for those who require emergency services.” Success at bringing a charge might set an important precedent for future cases, thereby deepening the toolkit of prosecutors beyond the typical cybercrime statutes.

“The main hurdle will be one of proof,” Urban says. “Legal causation will be there as soon as the prosecution can prove that the person died earlier, even if it’s only a few hours, because of the hack, but this is never easy to prove.” With the Düsseldorf attack, it was not possible to establish that the victim could have survived much longer, but in general it’s “absolutely possible” that hackers could be found guilty of manslaughter, Urban argues.

And where causation is established, Hartmann points out that exposure for criminal prosecution stretches beyond the hackers. Instead, anyone who can be shown to have contributed to the hack may also be prosecuted, he says. In the Düsseldorf case, for example, his team was preparing to consider the culpability of the hospital’s IT staff. Could they have better defended the hospital by monitoring the network more closely, for instance?

Posted on November 24, 2020 at 6:01 AMView Comments

Illegal Data Center Hidden in Former NATO Bunker

Interesting:

German investigators said Friday they have shut down a data processing center installed in a former NATO bunker that hosted sites dealing in drugs and other illegal activities. Seven people were arrested.

[…]

Thirteen people aged 20 to 59 are under investigation in all, including three German and seven Dutch citizens, Brauer said.

Authorities arrested seven of them, citing the danger of flight and collusion. They are suspected of membership in a criminal organization because of a tax offense, as well as being accessories to hundreds of thousands of offenses involving drugs, counterfeit money and forged documents, and accessories to the distribution of child pornography. Authorities didn’t name any of the suspects.

The data center was set up as what investigators described as a “bulletproof hoster,” meant to conceal illicit activities from authorities’ eyes.

Investigators say the platforms it hosted included “Cannabis Road,” a drug-dealing portal; the “Wall Street Market,” which was one of the world’s largest online criminal marketplaces for drugs, hacking tools and financial-theft wares until it was taken down earlier this year; and sites such as “Orange Chemicals” that dealt in synthetic drugs. A botnet attack on German telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom in late 2016 that knocked out about 1 million customers’ routers also appears to have come from the data center in Traben-Trarbach, Brauer said.

EDITED TO ADD (10/9): This is a better article.

Posted on October 9, 2019 at 6:34 AMView Comments

Germany Talking about Banning End-to-End Encryption

Der Spiegel is reporting that the German Ministry for Internal Affairs is planning to require all Internet message services to provide plaintext messages on demand, basically outlawing strong end-to-end encryption. Anyone not complying will be blocked, although the article doesn’t say how. (Cory Doctorow has previously explained why this would be impossible.)

The article is in German, and I would appreciate additional information from those who can speak the language.

EDITED TO ADD (6/2): Slashdot thread. This seems to be nothing more than political grandstanding: see this post from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Posted on May 24, 2019 at 8:39 AMView Comments

German Government Classifies Doll as Illegal Spyware

This is interesting:

The My Friend Cayla doll, which is manufactured by the US company Genesis Toys and distributed in Europe by Guildford-based Vivid Toy Group, allows children to access the internet via speech recognition software, and to control the toy via an app.

But Germany’s Federal Network Agency announced this week that it classified Cayla as an “illegal espionage apparatus”. As a result, retailers and owners could face fines if they continue to stock it or fail to permanently disable the doll’s wireless connection.

Under German law it is illegal to manufacture, sell or possess surveillance devices disguised as another object.

Another article.

Posted on February 20, 2017 at 6:55 AMView Comments

NSA Spies on Israeli Prime Minister

The Wall Street Journal has a story that the NSA spied on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli government officials, and incidentally collected conversations between US citizens—including lawmakers—and those officials.

US lawmakers who are usually completely fine with NSA surveillance are aghast at this behavior, as both Glenn Greenwald and Trevor Timm explain. Greenwald:

So now, with yesterday’s WSJ report, we witness the tawdry spectacle of large numbers of people who for years were fine with, responsible for, and even giddy about NSA mass surveillance suddenly objecting. Now they’ve learned that they themselves, or the officials of the foreign country they most love, have been caught up in this surveillance dragnet, and they can hardly contain their indignation. Overnight, privacy is of the highest value because now it’s their privacy, rather than just yours, that is invaded.

This reminds me of the 2013 story that the NSA eavesdropped on the cell phone of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Back then, I wrote:

Spying on foreign governments is what the NSA is supposed to do. Much more problematic, and dangerous, is that the NSA is spying on entire populations.

Greenwald said the same thing:

I’ve always argued that on the spectrum of spying stories, revelations about targeting foreign leaders is the least important, since that is the most justifiable type of espionage. Whether the U.S. should be surveilling the private conversations of officials of allied democracies is certainly worth debating, but, as I argued in my 2014 book, those “revelations … are less significant than the agency’s warrantless mass surveillance of whole populations” since “countries have spied on heads of state for centuries, including allies.”

And that’s the key point. I am less concerned about Angela Merkel than the other 82 million Germans that are being spied on, and I am less concerned about Benjamin Netanyahu than I am about the other 8 million people living in that country.

Over on Lawfare, Ben Wittes agrees:

There is absolutely nothing surprising about NSA’s activities here—or about the administration’s activities. There is no reason to expect illegality or impropriety. In fact, the remarkable aspect of this story is how constrained both the administration’s and the agency’s behavior appears to have been by rules and norms in exactly the fashion one would hope to see.

[…]

So let’s boil this down to brass tacks: NSA spied on a foreign leader at a time when his country had a major public foreign policy showdown with the President of the United States over a sharp differences between the two countries over Iran’s nuclearization—indeed, at a time when the US believed that leader was contemplating military action without advance notice to the United States. In the course of this surveillance, NSA incidentally collected communications involving members of Congress, who were being heavily lobbied by the Israeli government and Netanyahu personally. There is no indication that the members of Congress were targeted for collection. Moreover, there’s no indication that the rules that govern incidental collection involving members of Congress were not followed. The White House, for its part, appears to have taken a hands-off approach, directing NSA to follow its own policies about what to report, even on a sensitive matter involving delicate negotiations in a tense period with an ally.

The words that really matter are “incidental collection.” I have no doubt that the NSA followed its own rules in that regard. The discussion we need to have is about whether those rules are the correct ones. Section 702 incidental collection is a huge loophole that allows the NSA to collect information on millions of innocent Americans.

Greenwald again:

This claim of “incidental collection” has always been deceitful, designed to mask the fact that the NSA does indeed frequently spy on the conversations of American citizens without warrants of any kind. Indeed, as I detailed here, the 2008 FISA law enacted by Congress had as one of its principal, explicit purposes allowing the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans’ conversations without warrants of any kind. “The principal purpose of the 2008 law was to make it possible for the government to collect Americans’ international communications—and to collect those communications without reference to whether any party to those communications was doing anything illegal,” the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer said. “And a lot of the government’s advocacy is meant to obscure this fact, but it’s a crucial one: The government doesn’t need to ‘target’ Americans in order to collect huge volumes of their communications.”

If you’re a member of Congress, there are special rules that the NSA has to follow if you’re incidentally spied on:

Special safeguards for lawmakers, dubbed the “Gates Rule,” were put in place starting in the 1990s. Robert Gates, who headed the Central Intelligence Agency from 1991 to 1993, and later went on to be President Barack Obama’s Defense Secretary, required intelligence agencies to notify the leaders of the congressional intelligence committees whenever a lawmaker’s identity was revealed to an executive branch official.

If you’re a regular American citizen, don’t expect any such notification. Your information can be collected, searched, and then saved for later searching, without a warrant. And if you’re a common German, Israeli, or any other countries’ citizen, you have even fewer rights.

In 2014, I argued that we need to separate the NSA’s espionage mission against target agents for a foreign power from any broad surveillance of Americans. I still believe that. But more urgently, we need to reform Section 702 when it comes up for reauthorization in 2017.

EDITED TO ADD: A good article on the topic. And Marcy Wheeler’s interesting take.

Posted on January 5, 2016 at 6:36 AMView Comments

NSA German Intercepts

On Friday, WikiLeaks published three summaries of NSA intercepts of German government communications. To me, the most interesting thing is not the intercept analyses, but this spreadsheet of intelligence targets. Here we learn the specific telephone numbers being targeted, who owns those phone numbers, the office within the NSA that processes the raw communications received, why the target is being spied on (in this case, all are designated as “Germany: Political Affairs”), and when we started spying using this particular justification. It’s one of the few glimpses we have into the bureaucracy of surveillance.

Presumably this is from the same leaker who gave WikiLeaks the French intercepts they published a week ago. (And you can read the intelligence target spreadsheet for France, too. And another for Brazil that WikiLeaks published on Saturday; Intercept commentary here.) Now that we’ve seen a few top secret summaries of eavesdropping on German, French, and Brazilian communications, and given what I know of Julian Assange’s tactics, my guess is that there is a lot more where this came from.

Der Spiegel is all over this story.

Posted on July 6, 2015 at 5:13 AMView Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.