Bavarian Police Seeking Skype Trojan Informant 252
Andreaskem writes "Bavarian police searched the home of the spokesman for the German Pirate Party (Piratenpartei Deutschland) looking for an informant who leaked information about a government Trojan used to eavesdrop on Skype conversations. (The link is a Google translation of the German original.) There is a high probability that the Trojan is used illegally. A criminal law specialist said, 'The Bavarian authorities worked on the Trojan without a legitimate basis and now try to silence critics.' The informant need not worry since 'every information that could be used to identify him' is protected against unauthorized access by strong encryption. The Trojan is supposedly capable of eavesdropping on Skype conversations and obtaining technical details of the Skype client being used. It is deployed by e-mail or in place by the police. A Pirate Party spokesman said, 'Some of our officials seem to want to install the Big Brother state without the knowledge of the public.'"
Re:Disconcerting convergence of technologies... (Score:5, Interesting)
I can remember a debate I had a while back about the potential of some cheap wifi tech hooked up to a small webcam and worn on your person when going to protests or other events where you expect there to be a high chance of the police breaking the law. So that it could stream everything you see directly to a secure online store.
This would have great potential for making sure police who abuse their power get in trouble or are at least publicly shown to be abusing their power.
My friends rebuttal was that they'd simply introduce a law banning private citizens from using such devices at protests and call it a measure against pedophiles (to stop them filming the little kids walking around in the streets! You never know what they'd be thinking about if they had video of your children walking on a public street!!!).
As long as people will accept anything in the name of fighting terrorists or paedophiles then civil liberties are fucked.
It happens in the UK too. (Score:5, Interesting)
Posting Anonymously to protect my job,
I have been working for a few months on software designed to extract skype calls from streams of captured packets. The software is highly distributed, and while I can't know the exact use, I'm guessing it will be installed near every network interconnect point. Interestingly, it has nowehere near the performance required to record every skype call on the internet, so it will probably only be used for certain targets.
The good news is that the project is failing badly due to funding issues and poor management, and probably won't be deployed for years yet.
Note that this IS with the help of skype engineers - we haven't reverse engineered the encryption.
Contradiction in terms (Score:1, Interesting)
"A Pirate Party spokesman said, 'Some of our officials seem to want to install the Big Brother state without the knowledge of the public.'"
This would seem to be an impossible desire. In Orwell's 1984, the whole idea of Big Brother was that everyone knew they were under constant surveillance.
How can you know that 'Big Brother is Watching You', and at the same time not know it?
Choices vs. objects (Score:4, Interesting)
Murder can usefully be outlawed, because it is a choice that an intelligent person makes. (In fact, if the killer is mentally deficient and incapable of making that choice, it is treated different legally.) A gun, knife, automobile, HCl etc, morphine, are objects of varying degrees of danger and usefulness.
Particular objects are reasonably controlled when the danger they present is not obvious to an ordinary person. Someone not familiar with chemistry may be tragically surprised by the destructiveness of a bottle of HCl (although warning labels help). Hence it makes sense to make it hard to get unless you know what you are doing.
A knife is an obvious danger. Even if you don't speak the language. Even if you just came from deepest darkest Africa and have never seen technology before. A gun is an obvious danger to someone exposed to any technology of the last 400 years. (Although apparently too many idiots don't think about the danger of it going off accidentally.)
So objects likely to result in accidental death are controlled, and hopefully still available with a license that demonstrates basic competence. (And where you draw the line depends on how stupid you think the average citizen is.) And deliberating causing death via any means is illegal - although most places allow for circumstances like duels, self-defense, etc.
Controlling an object/substance to prevent accidental death does *not* protect anyone from intentional death via that object/substance. Gun control may prevent some accidental home shootings, but it does not stop criminals from getting guns. Heck, if nothing else go back to basics and make a primitive weapon from steel rod and homemade gunpowder like they did in the 18th century. What next? Outlaw lathes? Outlaw metal cutting tools that could be attached to a homemade lathe? Outlaw fire since it could be used to forge and temper metal cutting tools?
Stasi 2.0 (Score:3, Interesting)
For the first time in my life, I will attempt to post something informative on Slashdot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi_2.0 [wikipedia.org]
The, err, um, joke, is that the Stasi were the former East German secret police (1.0).
The major failure of the Stasi (1.0), was that they were collecting too much data, that they could ever dream of analyzing.
Has 2.0 deeper pockets?
Re:Disconcerting convergence of technologies... (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually legality of it would very from place to place. In the US it is totally legal to take pictures in public spaces but in some states it is illegal to record audio. Those laws are privacy laws.
Re:Contradiction in terms (Score:4, Interesting)
In this they are incorrect. The beauty of the Orwellification of the Western world right now is that it is with the full co-operation of the general public.
Step 1. Create imaginary bogeymen -- "terrorists", "pedophiles"
Step 2. Create hysteria that gives the false impression that said bogeymen are common, rather than, in reality, very rare.
Step 3. Create economic crisis to fan the flames of hatred and jealousy.
And viola, the general public will help you light the gas ovens.
We have learned nothing whatsoever from history. Nothing. Not. One. Thing.
Re: Bad german history (Score:5, Interesting)
The so called "disadvantage" isn't a real disadvantage. Why? People forget, generations go past. Old people die, young people are born. World War II will be a lesson as long as people who have lived during that era can tell something about it. That may be possible now but in about 30 years almost all people who went through that period will have died. Then, nobody can tell us about the horrors of WWII, the brutalities, the bombing raids, the razzias.
World War II will become like World War I, a forgotten war. As a joke I always use "Wilhelm II" as my avatar on every forum I am a member of. Nobody knows who "the guy with the weird moustache" is. Nobody is offended because it happened before any of us lived. The shockeffect is gone. 40 million people DIED in that war and I bet not even 1% can tell you who fought who.
It's a tragedy.
And the tragedy will return, but as a farce.
Nobody is safe from failings, people thinking that they are immune to making mistakes are wrong. You WILL support the wrong guy and he will take away your freedoms. You WILL cheer for the soldiers sent into a useless and bloody war. And the lessons will be learned by you and forgotten by your children.
I feel sorry for humanity.
Re:Bavarian police invading privacy!?! (Score:2, Interesting)
This leads to the unexpected result of handgun murders going up after handguns are banned.
I guess that explains why there are so many more handgun homicides in Europe than in the U.S... Oh, wait.
Re:Bavarian police invading privacy!?! (Score:1, Interesting)
If the Germans (or any non US country) has tried to pull something like this my assumption would be that they did it because the american police were already successfully doing it. That seems to be the trend with other freedom reducing government activities.
"Hey did you hear the americans are foin this now?"
"Ok get someone on it"
Re:Bavarian police invading privacy!?! (Score:2, Interesting)
Here is something your smart ass probably didn't know: if you have no access to a gun you can still kill someone! Wow, what a shocker!
Thank you for pointing that out. You're absolutely right; I had no idea that it is possible to kill someone without having access to a gun.
Still curious how banning handguns would cause the rate of handgun homicides to increase. Please feel free to enlighten my not-so-smart ass.
Re:Bavarian police invading privacy!?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Society most certainly 'exists', it may be a mirror of the collective will of the people who create it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Imagine 'society' being a giant voting bloc comprised of everybody. If you were to take a vote of 5000 people, how many of them would vote to kill one of their number rather than half? Almost all of them. If that means that individuals must die, so be it.
Rubbish. Totalitarian collectivism is firstly not what I was advocating, and secondly not responsible for hundreds of millions of people's deaths. I have yet to see an effectively collectivist society, and while that may seem to be a no-true-Scotsman fallacy, it may be that political theorists just have high standards.
In any case, even if it were true, so what if hundreds of millions of people died? That's the point of totalitarian collectivism- it doesn't matter if individuals die, as long as they serve the State in doing so.
Re:Bavarian police invading privacy!?! (Score:2, Interesting)
Buying insurance generates funds to research criminal activity and make communities safer.
Going slightly off topic, but I've always thought it would be a very interesting experiment to force police forces to offer insurance against crime.
Or, in a socialist country (like, I presume, we ALL are from, including you Americans) you could formalise the insurance as default compensation coverage for all citizens. If you had a violent crime perpetrated against you, you receive a sizable cash payment from the Polices' own budget. Anything to directly link police "profit" to a reduction in crime as experienced by the citizens with whose protection they are charged.
That would seem likely to "focus their minds", especially away from nonviolent consensual "crimes" like one stoner selling weed to another. There may be unintended consequences not immediately obvious in this gedankenexperiment, but I think it would be an interesting experiment at the least.
Re:Bavarian police invading privacy!?! (Score:3, Interesting)
In what way? A nuclear destruct device is an armament designed to deter the opponent from killing you on the risk that he himself will be killed.
A firearm, presumably, operates on much the same principles of deterrence.
A firearm is designed to kill your attacker, but generally not everyone on your block (I'm being generous in assuming a very small size here) and you along with it. If that was your intent, I would have just gone with the classic terrorist bomb-vest instead of the nuke. It's still ridiculous, as suicide is not one of the goals or even a likely outcome of self-defense using a gun. Mutually assured destruction does not apply.
Really? Are you saying that a smaller person cannot overcome a larger one? That a weaker person cannot overcome a stronger one?
Of course not. But those are the exceptional cases. The smaller person must be in better physical shape, and have not just the knowledge of how to incapacitate a larger opponent, but also the ability to do it under extreme pressure, and they need some luck as well because fights almost never go as planned.
Despite what you might like to believe, home invasions are very rare; home invasions in which people are killed, even rarer. Murders are very rare, and are more often than not they are committed by people who know each other, by a great margin. In fact, You seem to be under the belief that in fact, attackers choose their victims; this is rarely the case.
Of course they're rare. But that doesn't matter to the person who is the ultimate victim. Often the attacker is someone they know, such as an estranged ex-spouse or lover. They are often motivated by simple jealousy and rage, and restraining orders do little to stop them.
In any case, the point of that anecdote amongst others was to indicate that there is a perenial belief extant that one is surrounded by huge masses of well-armed, well-trained, and well-armored criminals, all of whom are apparently willing to conduct offensive maneuvers that would put Delta Force to shame at the drop of a hat in order to steal what petty cash someone might happen to have on their nightstand.
Or it could be that the perpetrator was simply offering it up as the only excuse he could come up with for his actions, even though he knew exactly what he was doing. I don't tend to fear paramilitary forces raiding my home. If they ever did, resistance would be a pretty bad idea.
Really, the restrictions that come into play with regard to self-defense in most jurisdictions rely on the fact that statistically speaking, the vast majority of self-defense situations do not involve one being attacked by special operations commandos, and therefore the force necessary to repel the attack is in fact far more limited than most people would at first imagine
Sure. I'd like to see you repel a larger attacker wielding a baseball bat. There's likely not more than a relative handful of people in this country or any other who could do that successfully. Unless the attacker does something very stupid, you're pretty screwed. I think normal people whose bodies are not lethal weapons should have the means to defend themselves too.
One of the primary motivations for restrictions on guns, amongst the usual attempts to limit their access by the criminal element, is to stop frightened individuals from wildly overreacting as they are so prone to do.
There are occasional overreactions, but most guns kept for self-defense are never even used. Of those that are used defensively, the vast majority are never fired. People are not as dumb and panicky as you like to think, especially if they've bothered to get any training, which is something that I'd recommend for all gun owners. Ultimately we're all responsible for our own safety, as there is nobody else willing or able to take that responsibility.
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