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Deutsch: Niederlande: Polizei will die Geräte ihrer Bürger hacken

The police should be allowed to hack into mobile phones and computers, even when these are located abroad. This is proposed in a draft law by the Dutch government on 2 May 2013.

While this appears to be a powerful asset for law enforcement, in reality it creates unnecessary vulnerabilities for citizens. Also, the proposal ignores several alternative solutions. The police already has the necessary means to fight cybercrime, but fails to apply them, due to limited resources and knowledge.

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Deutsch: ENDitorial: Eine Woche des Schreckens für die deutsche Netzpolitik

In Germany, political developments in the last week have been perceived as a frustrating defeat by the "Internet community", as three legislative measures that had been heavily criticised (and ridiculed) have progressed in the Parliament.

On 20 March 2013, "De-Mail", Germany's standard for "court-proof" electronic communications and document exchange between citizens, authorities and businesses, was discussed in a hearing in the Committee on Internal Affairs of the Bundestag (the "lower house" in Germa

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Deutsch: Überwachungsfirmen: Menschenrechtsorganisationen fordern OECD-Untersu...

In the beginning of February 2013 several human rights organisations, including Privacy International, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, Bahrain Watch and Reporters without Borders, filed formal complaints against surveillance software firms Gamma International and Trovicor.

The OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) National Contact Point (NCP) in the UK was asked to investigate Gamma International regarding

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Deutsch: ENDitorial: Fragen zum Entwurf für eine Strategie und eine Richtlinie...

A draft of the already announced EU Directive on Cybersecurity Strategy that is circulation in Brussels seems to be totally misguided, in EDRi's opinion.

The Commission seeks to put ENISA at the heart of a network to act as an early warning system for bad stuff on the Internet, which is good. What is wrong is that instead of pulling together police forces, CERTs and service providers, ENISA seeks to set up a classified network of military and intelligence

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Deutsch: Schwere Datenpanne bei der belgischen Bahn

At the end of December 2012, the personal data of more than one million customers of the Belgian train company SNCB Europe were available on-line, at a simple query in a search engine. The data contained in the SNCB database included names, email addresses and even, in some cases, phone numbers and home addresses.

The CleanIT project has received a huge amount of criticism from outside of the EU institutions. But imagine if the Commission had been alerted to the incoherence of the planned project. Imagine if, before investing 325.796 Euro in CleanIT, the European Commission had been warned that the project lacked methodology and did not represent value for money. Imagine if the Commission's independent checks of the initial proposal gave the project a “value for money” rating that was substantially less than half the minimum average score necessary.

Remarkably, this is exactly what happened.

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Deutsch: Exportbeschränkungen für digitale Waffen

While the European Governments often praise the positive role the Internet can have on the society in helping empower people and promoting freedom of information and expression, European mass surveillance and censorship software is being exported under their watch. Some governments not only fail to enact controls, but even further the export of such technology using export credit guarantees.

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Deutsch: Niederlande: Internationale Koalition fordert Rücknahme der Hacking-P...

An international coalition of more than 40 civil rights organizations and security experts have expressed their “grave concerns” about a Dutch proposal to break into foreign computers and search and delete data.