Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
I sent Steve 2 emails this week with feedback on the show, here they are for everyone else as well:
Hi Steve,
with regard to the government spyware in Ireland, Germany tried this about a decade ago, the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst (Federal Intelligence Service, the equivalent of the NSA) and the State Police tried to get a law in place to allow the use of the Bundestrojaner (Federal Trojan). The Constitutional Court in German declared it illegal.
However the one “good” thing about it was that, at least for German citizens, the authorities had to get a court order to install the spyware, which was hidden, and either put on the device physically (somehow getting access to the device when the owner wasn’t looking, or by using a specially manipulated website to slip the spyware onboard.
To be honest, if there has to be a way of tracking the bad guys, getting a warrant or court order, after having submitted enough evidence to warrant its issue, and only then being able to put it on targeted devices of the identified suspect is about the only way this would and should work. There is no way people would put up with an EU pre-installed spyware solution on their devices.
Regarding ISPs, the government (German Federal Government) has been trying to get them to save the meta data on connections, but most refuse as it is too costly and they didn’t want to pay for equipment to store the data. I think they now store it for 72 hours, after which it is automatically deleted (at least that was the last request I remember being covered in the press). If they are served a warrant, they have to store the meta data for the explicitly named customer for as long as needed and hand it over to authorities.
Why don’t they want to pay to store the meta data? Because it is useless to them, what would they do with it? They can’t use it to sell ads and they cannot sell the data on to third parties without the customer agreeing in writing (it is opt-in on the contract, that they can use the information for marketing purposes, but nobody in their right mind would check that box.
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