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German government to use Trojan spyware to monitor citizens

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Re: German government to use Trojan spyware to monitor citizens

#41

Post by raverbashing »

brakmic wrote: post #34
SXX wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I doubt they have any professional Linux programmers working for them. Working for the State also means earning only a fraction of what you can earn in the free market. Fortunately for them there is enough of commercial companies already that sell high-quality spyware to any government that able to pay for it.

Those companies also lack professional programmers. Actually, such companies sell for extremely expensive software programmed by students or consultants. The CCC disassembled the trojan and found out that they've used simple string manipulations to split Win32-APIs. For example OpenFile was split into "Open" and "File" etc.

In today's world we can assume that the number of programmers with deep knowledge of systems is only going to dwindle

I shudder to think of code written by interns

But why would they split 'Open' and 'File'?

Re: German government to use Trojan spyware to monitor citizens

#43

Post by brakmic »

teamhappy wrote: post #38
sanid wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's developed by the Federal Criminal Police Office [0] (german BKA) They also bought another program from FinFisher as a backup that needs to be altered to fit the regulations and stuff. [0] only in German sorry: http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/bundestrojaner-in...

I don't know what "Steigerung der passgenauen Einsatzfähigkeit" means (I speak german; I just don't know what it means), but it sounds like they still need the exploits from FinFisher.

I think it means "better aim". "Passgenau" could mean "better fitted fit" which is actually a tautology because a "fit" already "fits".

Legal German is like any other "legal Language". Not for human consumption. ;)

Re: German government to use Trojan spyware to monitor citizens

#45

Post by germanier »

TheCoreh wrote: post #37
creshal wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's their usual shtick. The same was used to legitimize blanket license plate scanning (now used for speeding tickets) and data retention laws (mainly used for drug trafficking). "Life-threatening danger" my ass.

> The same was used to legitimize blanket license plate scanning Was that ever illegal? The license plates are publicly displayed and visible, and you could already put people on the field watching and manually noting the license plates down, or even put cameras and look at the footage later. The only thing that changes is the economics of making it automated, no?

German courts routinely differentiate between things done automatically at high-speed and the same action performed manually. While the former is theoretically equivalent to the latter, in practice it's impossible to do large-scale data evaluation by hand so it's not reasonable to judge them by the same criteria. Additionally, in Germany the state and the people are barred from using certain kinds of information in mass even if they had been publicly displayed.

Just as a more concrete example, I'm not allowed to point a camera out of my window and film the things happening at the lively public street below me 24/7. A single short clip of the general area on the other hand is completely fine.

Re: German government to use Trojan spyware to monitor citizens

#46

Post by gotchange »

actionwords wrote: post #13
gotchange wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source please? Anecdotally speaking, FB & TW are doing an awful job of complying with Merkel's "supposed orders" as I see people dissing her and her policies esp. immigration whether for or against all the time and in German too.

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/27/angela-merkel-caught-on-hot-m... On the sidelines of a United Nations luncheon on Saturday, Merkel was caught on a hot mic pressing Zuckerberg about social media posts about the wave of Syrian refugees entering Germany, the publication reported. The Facebook CEO was overheard responding that "we need to do some work" on curtailing anti-immigrant posts about the refugee crisis. "Are you…

This is just friendly chit chat/small talk on the sidelines of a UN event not the draconian and sky-falling issue as you portrayed it.

Don't you think that something that grave would warrant official communications instead other than informal exchange of words without a single mention of refugees or immigrants?

Much ado about nothing!

Re: German government to use Trojan spyware to monitor citizens

#47

Post by kuschku »

raverbashing wrote: post #41
brakmic wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those companies also lack professional programmers. Actually, such companies sell for extremely expensive software programmed by students or consultants. The CCC disassembled the trojan and found out that they've used simple string manipulations to split Win32-APIs. For example OpenFile was split into "Open" and "File" etc.

In today's world we can assume that the number of programmers with deep knowledge of systems is only going to dwindle I shudder to think of code written by interns But why would they split 'Open' and 'File'?

Obfuscation.

Re: German government to use Trojan spyware to monitor citizens

#48

Post by Xylakant »

TheCoreh wrote: post #37
creshal wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's their usual shtick. The same was used to legitimize blanket license plate scanning (now used for speeding tickets) and data retention laws (mainly used for drug trafficking). "Life-threatening danger" my ass.

> The same was used to legitimize blanket license plate scanning Was that ever illegal? The license plates are publicly displayed and visible, and you could already put people on the field watching and manually noting the license plates down, or even put cameras and look at the footage later. The only thing that changes is the economics of making it automated, no?

In Germany any kind of data collection must be backed by a cause. So automated license plate scanning was illegal since it allows creation of movement profiles by the state, something that is very much frowned upon.

Putting fixed cameras up and filming the public is not legal either in Germany - you can't have a surveillance camera pointed to public space, for example filming the boardwalk in front of your house. Whether dashcams are legal is still contested [1].

Whether large=scale manual collection would be legal is an interesting question which has - to the best of my limited knowledge - never been put to the test :)

[1] a fairly ok high level summary in german: https://www.adac.de/infotestrat/ratgeber-verkehr/verkehrsrec...

Re: German government to use Trojan spyware to monitor citizens

#49

Post by barrkel »

TheCoreh wrote: post #37
creshal wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's their usual shtick. The same was used to legitimize blanket license plate scanning (now used for speeding tickets) and data retention laws (mainly used for drug trafficking). "Life-threatening danger" my ass.

> The same was used to legitimize blanket license plate scanning Was that ever illegal? The license plates are publicly displayed and visible, and you could already put people on the field watching and manually noting the license plates down, or even put cameras and look at the footage later. The only thing that changes is the economics of making it automated, no?

Pervasive automated license plate scanning is a qualitative change. It's one thing to have a chap by the side of the road writing numbers into a piece of paper; it's another thing entirely to track most of the routes of all vehicles in a city. You can't trivially extend the principle of one to permitting the other, since it's not feasible to flood an entire city with spotters with notepads.

Re: German government to use Trojan spyware to monitor citizens

#50

Post by kuschku »

thinkindie wrote: post #29

considered how Germans are obsessed with privacy and state surveillance (see for example cash usage vs electronic payments), let's see a country going nut in 3 2 1 ...

We won’t really go nuts over this – the trojan is so bad, it won’t do any real damage.
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