German Police Arrest Admin of Tor Anonymity Server 428
An anonymous reader writes "In a recent blog posting, a German operator of a Tor anonymous proxy server revealed that he was arrested by German police officers at the end of July. Showing up at his house at midnight on a Sunday night, police cuffed and arrested him in front of his wife and seized his equipment. In a display of both bitter irony and incompetence, the police did not take or shut-down the Tor server responsible for the traffic they were interested in, which was located in a data center, over 500km away. In the last year, Germany has passed a draconian new anti-security research law and raided seven different data centers to seize Tor servers. While back in 2003, A German court ordered the developers of a different anonymity network to build a back-door into their system."
gestapo (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Securty vs Freedom (Score:4, Interesting)
silly germany (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Securty vs Freedom (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anyone recall the French Revolution?
Chilling effect (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorta like how the US government has been complaining about the difficulty of hiring Arabic translators, despite the statistics from a few years back saying that there were several million US residence who were fluent in Arabic. (And, contrary to the jokes going around, they aren't all gay.
It's commonly known as "shooting yourself in the foot".
Re:Kind of makes sense. (Score:5, Interesting)
BUT german laws say (Score:5, Interesting)
for example, "Teledienstgesetz" (translate this as: Telecommunications Act) says
(1) Diensteanbieter sind für fremde Informationen, die sie in einem Kommunikationsnetz übermitteln oder zu denen sie den Zugang zur Nutzung vermitteln, nicht verantwortlich, sofern sie
1. die Übermittlung nicht veranlasst,
2. den Adressaten der übermittelten Informationen nicht ausgewählt und
3. die übermittelten Informationen nicht ausgewählt oder verändert haben.
1. didn't initiate the connection,
2. didn't choose the recipients and
3. didn't choose or change the information.
Fire that lawmaker (Score:2, Interesting)
Happy new computer virus infected Germany!
(Or rather, to hell with it.)
Re:Suggestion (Score:3, Interesting)
Heh; good suggestion.
In high school, I took a couple years of German from a teacher who was born here in the US, of German immigrant parents. She taught us a lot of German proverbs, and one of the first (also the title of a well-known folk song) was "die Gedanken sind frei" [wikipedia.org], or "[my/our] Thoughts are Free". Her point was that the sort of repression recently imposed by the Nazis wasn't at all an aberration in German-speaking society; it was really just an extreme case of something with a long history in that society and many others. The proverb (and song) long predate the Nazis, and make the point that the authorities may be able to punish you for what you do or say, but they can't control your thoughts. She commented that she had often heard older Germans (in Germany and the US) muttering this phrase or quietly humming the final line of the song when some political big-wig said or did something that threatened citizens freedoms. She made it clear that this was often as appropriate in the US as in other countries.
It was sorta fun being taught such quiet resistance in German. Some of us did understand that, contrary to all the propaganda telling us how free we were, her job could well be in danger if certain people in the local government understood what she was teaching her students.
(Another lesson explained why that "die" in the proverb isn't best translated literally to English as "the", and why a pronoun is a better translation in such cases. It's a subtlety that the above wikipedia page gets wrong. It's sorta like why, when Kennedy declared "Ich bin ein Berliner", he was actually telling the audience that he was a jelly-filled doughnut.
First They Came for the Jews (Score:2, Interesting)
Misquoting Benjamin Franklin (Score:5, Interesting)
The actual quote, which you failed to attribute, is by Benjamin Franklin and reads:
Note the adjectives "essential" and "temporary". To earn the "Insightful" moderations, which the clueless mods have given you already anyway, you must demonstrate, that the given-up liberty is essential, and that the gained security is only temporary.
Can you? I don't think so...
Re:Kind of makes sense. (Score:3, Interesting)
That's like the idiots that don't want stores to sell crowbars because some burglers use them to break into houses. Common sense here says my right to buy a crowbar without obtaining a permit from the government is not a fredom that should be revoked simply because some people abuse it. If you don't like them using a crowbar to pry open your front door, find another way to deal with them. Don't revoke a right from me.
This is just a government's typical reaction to a situation where something is happening that they don't like, and they can't come up with an effective yet reasonable way to stop it, so they take draconian measures to make it stop, regardless of the fredoms that get trampled upon. Most of the rights abuses we see nowadays can be tracked back to this thought process.
Laws like this follow closely with "the end justifies the means" line of thinking. The end (alone) never justifies the means. If every reason you have for passing a law can be reduced to that one pilar, you are making a bad law.
Re:German gov hasn't outlawed anonymity (yet) (Score:2, Interesting)
Malum in se --> Bad in and of itself. These are true crimes. Anyone who has them done against them will object to these... they have victims that can always be identified. These crimes can always be identified as the initiation of force against a victim of some sort. Even the dumping of chemicals into the water supply has human victims.
Examples of things that are bad in and of themselves...
--rape (physical invasion), murder(deprivation of life), kidnapping(deprivation of freedom), extortion, fraud, robbery(deprivations of property), arson, torture.
Malum prohibitum --> Bad by prohibition/legislation. This is stuff that politicians have legislated illegal... they have nothing to do with wrong, or being bad, but merely with being against the agenda politicians support.
Examples of things that were banned by decree...
--personal encryption, personal privacy, marijuana, hemp, freedom of association, freedom of speech (almost gone), freedom of movement (papers please), personal safety (such as victim disarmament laws / gun control, remember that ordinary Jews (not the Zionist bankers) were disarmed in 1938 in Germany by government decree and they gave up their arms!!)
Remember this the next time a politician sells you a "necessary" step... it generally means they need you to willingly surrender your natural rights. Next time you glorify the "Jewish victims" remember that they surrendered their arms and their lives by merely consenting and walking into those death camps. Fear or sheeple syndrome, something made them consent to walk in there instead of fighting to the death to stay, life and die free. Every animal fights for its life, yet humans surrender everything by mere request. Amazing species, I must say.
Re:Fire that lawmaker (Score:1, Interesting)
Computers skills are not as important as nerd would like to think. Get over it, because in the next years Europe will enact draconian laws which will push IT development into the third world, and European WILL behave and learn to live without software development. The European economy doesn't need them. The European citizen does not need to know anything about computers beyond everyday skills.
Europeans crave security above all things. They will obey. They will comply. Don't harbor any illusions.
Re:Ah Europe, progressive land of freedom (Score:2, Interesting)
The United States and the UK are respectively categorized as "Extensive surveillance societies" and "Endemic surveillance societies".
Re:Securty vs Freedom (Score:2, Interesting)
(Not because I think you're making stuff up - I have no doubt that the standard version of the story is very inaccurate, as most founding-legends tend to be - but because I'd like to read further about the modern understanding of events!)
Re:Old Memes vs. Karma (Score:2, Interesting)
(The other 20% are either car analogies or people citing statistics they just made up.)
Re:Ah Europe, progressive land of freedom (Score:2, Interesting)
The major flaw in their study is that they seem to focus on one very limited aspect of "privacy", i.e. wiretapping,etc. What they should also take into account is whether there are clear rules governing admissibility of those materials in court. After all, if the government can listen to what you say or watch what you do but cannot use it in court, why should you be too worried?
And don't forget that most European countries are now restricting freedom of speech in unacceptable ways. Take a look at this EU directive: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/file.jsp?id=216962 [europa.eu]. Someone who criticizes Islam, Christianity, Judaism or any other religion might be charged under this statute, since it might be argued that he is inciting hatred against members of this religion.
All in all, I think the US is still 'freer' than most countries in Europe: can you be a holocaust denier in Europe? Can you reveal a politician's dirty secrets without being charged for slander or libel (in many European countries, if it is a 'private matter', you're not even allowed to prove in court that what you wrote or said is true).
Re:Ah Europe, progressive land of freedom (Score:3, Interesting)
Look, every single person in the world believes their taxes are unreasonably high. This is rarely true. Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] provides an interesting chart, which shows Sweden as having high personal taxes (but somewhat lower than France, Germany, and Belgium), and pretty reasonable corporate taxes (where the supposedly more capitalist USA has among the highest listed). God only knows if the chart is accurate or meaningful, of course, given the source.
Re:Securty vs Freedom (Score:5, Interesting)
The most realistic alternative is to call the news media (or anyone you know who has a video camera).
Re:Ah Europe, progressive land of freedom (Score:2, Interesting)
I guess some people think Sweden is cool because of the pirate bay and how it's pretty much "ok" to download copyrighted material and such. But my guess is that we'll be just as the states within a couple of years.
Re:Securty vs Freedom (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The regularity of anti-German FUD (Score:1, Interesting)
"If you live in Germany then it stands to reason that you observe the German laws and render unto Ceaser, that which is Ceaser's."
If you are a German then all German laws apply to everyone else in Germany but you yourself. Germany doesn't have many criminals but they are in no way law abiding cititzens.
As far as rendering unto Ceaser I'm not too sure about that either. Even when I lived in Italy I never know so many people lying or hiding facts to avoid taxes.
Germany is one of the few countries (maybe the only one) where I like the government and overreaching society but not the general character of the majority of the individuals I meet.
Greetings from Bavaria
Captcha: "pompous" does that mean me or the Germans?