Telecom 'Big Brother' case worries freedom-loving Germans
Agence France-Presse
First Posted 11:27:00 06/01/2008
Filed Under: Data Protection, Telecommunications Services, Human Rights, Internet
BERLIN--George Orwell's "Big Brother" surveillance came close to reality with the East German Stasi secret police. Now in a high-tech, reunited and democratic country many fear it might be making a comeback.
Last week it was revealed that the country's main phone company Deutsche Telekom hired an outside firm to spy on phone calls made by its own board members and journalists to uncover the source of press leaks.
Even the eminent former head of Germany's powerful industry lobby, the BDI, branded Telekom's methods "reprehensible and disgraceful" and similar to the "methods of the Stasi."
Investigators raided the firm's headquarters, as chief executive Rene Obermann stressed that the personal data of the company's millions of fixed-line and mobile clients are "secure."
But civil liberties groups, mindful of Orwell's novel "1984" about a totalitarian regime headed by a dictator named "Big Brother" which monitored every individual, are not so sure.
Since January, telecom firms have been obliged by law to keep a record of every e-mail sent, every phone call made -- mobile or otherwise -- and all Internet usage as part of measures to prevent terrorism and fight crime.
They are not meant to record or listen to the phone calls or read the e-mails. All that is kept is who e-mailed or phoned whom, and which websites were visited; and to keep this log for six months for police to consult.
Germany has never been the victim of an Islamist terror attack, but police say they have foiled major plots, and critics accept that preventing such attacks is a noble enough aim.
But they say that the potential for errors and abuse is huge, that a culture of excessive surveillance is pervading other areas of life and that the measures are being implemented in a ham-fisted manner.
Terrorists don't generally e-mail each other spelling out planned attacks, and they are probably sophisticated enough to evade phone surveillance, they say.
"Those methods affect everybody and are powerful methods of political control," says Patrick Breyer from Arbeitskreis Vorratsdatenspeicherung, a group that organized potests in some 30 German cities Saturday.
What is dangerous is that all the data are being accumulated in the hands of one powerful authority in a country sensitive about its past, he says.
"This is a characteristic of agencies such as the Stasi and the (Nazi political police) Gestapo. This is a very good reason why those powers, after 1945, were given to the Laender (state) authorities rather than a federal authority," he says.
Even before it emerged that Deutsche Telekom had spied on the press -- the Financial Times Deutschland claims there were secret cameras in its newsroom -- journalists in Germany were finding it harder to get people to talk.
How much is known was brought home to people who happened to be within a few kilometers of a fire in a town near Hamburg a couple of years back.
People who were, and who carried a mobile phone, received a letter from the police asking them to account for their whereabouts, according to a report in the local newspaper.
Recipients of the letters were amazed that the authorities could so easily know where they were, and were angry that they were made to feel like suspects.
"Does this mean I am now a suspect?" a 43-year-old local resident asked. "Should I call a lawyer?"
The potential for errors and abuse is also large, as a German professor found out last year when the police knocked on his door, turned his home upside down and confiscated his computer on suspicion of downloading child pornography.
It turned out that an Internet service provider had given the police the wrong IP address, and that the information had been handed over in an unprofessional and possibly illegal manner.
In another case reported by Berlin daily Tageszeitung, the home of a protester at the G8 summit in Germany in 2007 was raided by police on suspicion that he had set fire to a building belonging to a firm called Dussmann.
But the police had added two and two and made five. They thought the man was involved because they discovered he had done an Internet search for Dussmann.
The problem was that he was looking for another Dussmann, one of Berlin's biggest bookshops, which wasn't burned down.
Civil liberties groups have made some progress in drawing attention to their campaign.
Much of the legislation coming out of Germany's fractious left-right "grand coalition" has been drawn up badly and has had to be sent back to the drawing board.
And in March, Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble -- the main author of much of the recent anti-terror legislation -- was hoisted by his own petard when a hacker group got hold of his fingerprints from a glass he had used.
The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) then published the prints in their magazine, saying it was a stunt to protest against the inclusion of biometric data on Germans' passports since last year.
They argue that fingerprints are a poor choice for identity documents because they are easy to collect, and also to reproduce -- the group's website contains a 12-step guide for how to create a fake set of fingerprints.
"The main point we want to illustrate here is that biometric fingerprints don't offer any security, they just enhance the surveillance of citizens," CCC spokesman Frank Rieger says.
Chancellor Angela Merkel got the same treatment when it emerged earlier this year that video surveillance cameras set up outside a museum in central Berlin reportedly offered security guards a view into her living room.
"People in parliament and people in ministries have little clue technically as to what is going on and they won't listen to expert advice at all," Rieger told AFP earlier this year.
"Their own scientific studies said the data retention will not help with crime prevention yet they pass the laws because they feel they need to show somehow we are more secure with this law, which in fact isn't the case."
|
