4 ms·

Because this company was the developer of the "Staatstrojaner" malware government agencies used to hack into computer systems to investigate crimes. I think the

by hnbad 5y ago

Because this company was the developer of the "Staatstrojaner" malware government agencies used to hack into computer systems to investigate crimes. I think the original use case was just terrorism but I'm pretty sure it's been used against other crimes as well. As to why the German public tolerate it: because there wasn't sufficient pushback and the government doesn't care about a few protests as most people will eventually forget about it and move on.

spacemanmatt 5y ago
Seems to me like the government should internally own their malware rather than tolerate a company that presumably sells to other governments or private entities. Mine was a rhetorical question of course.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  That would require the state to attract (and compensate) IT talent. As far as I know, they are trying..
- hnbad 5y ago
  You mean like a state owned enterprise? That would go against decades of free market ideology. Even if we had somehow ended up with a state owned malware development organization it would probably have been privatized by now.
  - robertlagrant 5y ago
    Are you joking? Many states do this. E.g. in the UK they had a massive hiring binge for cyber a few years ago. They will also buy from third parties. That's not ideology (the free market can't really be deemed an ideology), that's just not succumbing to an (actual) ideology that says the state must own everything.
    - hnbad 5y ago
      > the free market can't really be deemed an ideology The free market isn't an ideology much like money isn't an ideology. Putting the free market in charge of certain aspects of society however is very much an ideological decision, though. Ideology doesn't stop being ideology just because you agree with it (although there are certainly plenty of political candidates throughout history who claim to not adhere to any ideologies). For example anarchists are somewhat open to market economies while state communists usually advocate for central planning and libertarians are strongly in favor of free market maximalism, believing that for a free market to work at its best it needs to be free of all regulations (tho usually still maintaing some rule of law to prevent a real world equivalent of EVE Online's corporate warfare). I'm not saying privatization is good or bad, I'm just saying that the underlying ideology of the past decades in Germany has been that we should privatize as much as possible and where privatization is not possible we should at least reproduce a free market system as closely as possible (e.g. we have multiple competing public healthcare providers despite having strict regulations that mean they all provide very similar levels of care). > Many states do this. We do have people in government agencies "doing cyber". We just don't have a government owned software development department developing malware for government agencies to use, just like we don't have a government owned weapons manufacturing department developing weapons for the police and military. We do have the government owning shares (even majority shares) in private (or rather publicly traded) companies though. But often these are in privatized branches of the government (e.g. Deutsche Bahn) or companies that are naturally monopolistic. Buying out a private software development company would go against the spirit of the free market as it would eliminate competition.
- kuboble 5y ago
  We have private companies designing and building weapons. There are laws regarding who it can be sold to or where it can be exported. I believe malware is in the same category.
- saagarjha 5y ago
  At least in the US, there are caps on how much you can pay an internal employee that generally do not pay for a top-tier researcher who’d develop malware like this. Instead you would pay some contractor a much higher rate that they could pass some portion of to their own researchers.
- mikro2nd 5y ago
  Sometimes (frequently) you want an arms-length/plausibly-deniable relationship so that government can do edgy/illegal stuff but duck the blowback if it all goes pear-shaped or gets exposed to the sanitising light of day. See also extraordinary rendition.
zeepzeep 5y ago
> I think the original use case was just terrorism but I'm pretty sure it's been used against other crimes as well. As with every dystopic "anti-terror" measurement, this is correct.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  This is somehow such a difficult thing for people to grasp. "Yes the government gained the power to reach into our bank accounts, but it was for a good reason. I'm sure neither this nor any future government will ever abuse that power or mislay information they now have access to."
freeflight 5y ago
> I think the original use case was just terrorism but I'm pretty sure it's been used against other crimes as well. This kind of stuff is always justified with "terrorism, pedophilia and organized crime", but once its in place it's usually overwhelmingly applied to much pettier crimes.
- hnbad 5y ago
  It's usually CSAM or child sexual abuse in general, not pedophilia, but yes. For example Internet censorship (I believe in the form of IP bans but I'm not sure how they're meant to be implemented exactly) was originally justified with the necessity of blocking CSAM in jurisdictions that are out of reach of Germany and the EU but recently there were moves to ban the pornsite XHamster because it provided an insufficient age check to visitors (although with similar sites it's usually nothing more than a popup to the effect of "Are you old enough to view porn? Y/N"), which while still boiling down to "think of the children" isn't exactly the kind of thing von der Leyen originally described when shooting down criticism of the proposed law.

by hnbad 5y ago

spacemanmatt 5y ago

Seems to me like the government should internally own their malware rather than tolerate a company that presumably sells to other governments or private entities. Mine was a rhetorical question of course.

hutzlibu 5y ago
That would require the state to attract (and compensate) IT talent. As far as I know, they are trying..
hnbad 5y ago
You mean like a state owned enterprise? That would go against decades of free market ideology. Even if we had somehow ended up with a state owned malware development organization it would probably have been privatized by now.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  Are you joking? Many states do this. E.g. in the UK they had a massive hiring binge for cyber a few years ago. They will also buy from third parties. That's not ideology (the free market can't really be deemed an ideology), that's just not succumbing to an (actual) ideology that says the state must own everything.
  - hnbad 5y ago
    > the free market can't really be deemed an ideology The free market isn't an ideology much like money isn't an ideology. Putting the free market in charge of certain aspects of society however is very much an ideological decision, though. Ideology doesn't stop being ideology just because you agree with it (although there are certainly plenty of political candidates throughout history who claim to not adhere to any ideologies). For example anarchists are somewhat open to market economies while state communists usually advocate for central planning and libertarians are strongly in favor of free market maximalism, believing that for a free market to work at its best it needs to be free of all regulations (tho usually still maintaing some rule of law to prevent a real world equivalent of EVE Online's corporate warfare). I'm not saying privatization is good or bad, I'm just saying that the underlying ideology of the past decades in Germany has been that we should privatize as much as possible and where privatization is not possible we should at least reproduce a free market system as closely as possible (e.g. we have multiple competing public healthcare providers despite having strict regulations that mean they all provide very similar levels of care). > Many states do this. We do have people in government agencies "doing cyber". We just don't have a government owned software development department developing malware for government agencies to use, just like we don't have a government owned weapons manufacturing department developing weapons for the police and military. We do have the government owning shares (even majority shares) in private (or rather publicly traded) companies though. But often these are in privatized branches of the government (e.g. Deutsche Bahn) or companies that are naturally monopolistic. Buying out a private software development company would go against the spirit of the free market as it would eliminate competition.
kuboble 5y ago
We have private companies designing and building weapons. There are laws regarding who it can be sold to or where it can be exported. I believe malware is in the same category.
saagarjha 5y ago
At least in the US, there are caps on how much you can pay an internal employee that generally do not pay for a top-tier researcher who’d develop malware like this. Instead you would pay some contractor a much higher rate that they could pass some portion of to their own researchers.
mikro2nd 5y ago
Sometimes (frequently) you want an arms-length/plausibly-deniable relationship so that government can do edgy/illegal stuff but duck the blowback if it all goes pear-shaped or gets exposed to the sanitising light of day. See also extraordinary rendition.

zeepzeep 5y ago

> I think the original use case was just terrorism but I'm pretty sure it's been used against other crimes as well. As with every dystopic "anti-terror" measurement, this is correct.

robertlagrant 5y ago
This is somehow such a difficult thing for people to grasp. "Yes the government gained the power to reach into our bank accounts, but it was for a good reason. I'm sure neither this nor any future government will ever abuse that power or mislay information they now have access to."

freeflight 5y ago

> I think the original use case was just terrorism but I'm pretty sure it's been used against other crimes as well. This kind of stuff is always justified with "terrorism, pedophilia and organized crime", but once its in place it's usually overwhelmingly applied to much pettier crimes.

hnbad 5y ago
It's usually CSAM or child sexual abuse in general, not pedophilia, but yes. For example Internet censorship (I believe in the form of IP bans but I'm not sure how they're meant to be implemented exactly) was originally justified with the necessity of blocking CSAM in jurisdictions that are out of reach of Germany and the EU but recently there were moves to ban the pornsite XHamster because it provided an insufficient age check to visitors (although with similar sites it's usually nothing more than a popup to the effect of "Are you old enough to view porn? Y/N"), which while still boiling down to "think of the children" isn't exactly the kind of thing von der Leyen originally described when shooting down criticism of the proposed law.