Following Schily's footsteps is the Interior Minister of Schleswig-Holstein. And once again, he resorts to polemics because the arguments are lacking.
The way in which the Interior Minister reacts to criticism from data protection authorities is increasingly disregarding a factual assessment and is limited to granting absolute priority to the police and law enforcement or general security. Data protection is thus equated with hindering law enforcement, and there is no interest in balancing the two. The maxim "Germany should become safe and free" is followed in such a way that there is no doubt which characteristic prevails here. Even if this security can only ever represent a false sense of security.
And this does not only affect Schleswig-Holstein; it can be felt throughout the federal territory - and in the idiotic attempts at the European level. It is not about accusing individual police officers of being scoundrels who only want to spy on their fellow citizens. It is not about accusing the police of not responsibly handling their means.
It is about the state having a position of power vis-Ã -vis the citizen, which is controlled and limited for very conscious reasons - and the legislative initiatives within the framework of the expansion of police powers lift this control and limitation. The police are not just any service provider - they are the executive arm of the executive - one of the three powers in our system. We already have far too close a connection between the legislature and the executive - every time the government arrogates itself the legislative power, I feel sick. The Bundestag is the legislature, not just the government (not even just the government coalition).
The control of the possibilities of the powers and the limitation of their power is a very essential aspect of a healthy state. A state in which the executive gains too much power moves away from this ideal line, develops sooner or later into a police state, into a surveillance state. It is not just about banal claims like "data protection = perpetrator protection" - that is ridiculous and polemical. It is about the rights of the individual citizen, about the possibility of shaping one's own life without a big brother constantly looking over one's shoulder. But exactly that is being done more and more in recent times - the installation of the big brother.
Data protection advocates and warning voices are not just world-remote cranks who don't want to see the problem - they are simply those who can already see today what is coming our way tomorrow. And it is frightening that we are only inadequately protected by the highest constitutional court - inadequately because even their decisions are attacked and ignored by politicians.
The warning against the all-powerful state is not paranoia, it is realism. We have had the all-powerful state quite often - and we have recently incorporated an incarnation of it. None of these all-powerful states really worked, all of them collapsed. But the people in these states had to suffer under them.
Django Paste - Ian is starting to integrate Django with paste (and paste deploy). I for one will most definitely try to support that, so his list of related tickets is already down by one. Paste deploy might even be taken as the future default FCGI/SCGI solution - because it uses the same FLUP lib, it is as capable as my scripts, but due to the structure of Paste, installation should be much easier (and might even be standard in the future with Python hosters).
EU Parliamentarians Justify Massive Telecommunications Surveillance - and they can hardly see their feet due to their pride in their own great achievement. It's just funny that critics keep saying things like this:
Patrick Breyer, a jurist from Elmshorn and one of the heads of the civil rights movement against data retention, is not satisfied with the justifications. He describes the restrictions achieved by the Parliament as "worthless". According to him, the stored information could indeed be released for other purposes such as espionage by intelligence agencies, untargeted search for crimes, or marketing, by referring to another data protection directive. There is no evidence that the crime rate has decreased by referring to partly already stored traffic data. Overall, the directive represents a "serious deterioration compared to the current legal situation".
But of course, we are certainly all wrong, because after all:
Reul, meanwhile, considers all concerns of citizens about a long and non-transparent storage of their personal data to be "dispelled" with the approved draft law.
So if they see that as dispelled, then we are not allowed to object at all. Why do we elect these people if they then stab us in the back? Also amusing are the really informed comparisons:
Gebhardt justifies his approval of blanket surveillance with two comparisons: Thus, anyone who sends a letter today also discloses the associated "traffic data" in the form of sender and recipient, for example, to the postman. Every driver must also be aware that his vehicle owner data has always been stored and, for example, determined when flashing at a red light and used for an investigation. These are "exclusively legal practices" that the authorities would also use in the case of data retention.
Well. If I were to bring that to a realistic comparison: every movement of the vehicle is registered and stored at the starting point and destination. Every conversation in the pub is noted regarding the people involved. Every letter is centrally stored in a database regarding sender and recipient. And the accesses can - provided a somewhat targeted argumentation of the authorities - be used for almost any purpose. Without a court order. And the data must be retained for two years - without any suspicion.
Strangely enough, this is not even the case with letters in reality. Yes, the postal secrecy can be lifted by court order - but nevertheless, there is no two-year history there that is only recorded on suspicion. With vehicles, the owner is indeed recorded - and noted accordingly in case of violations - but not necessarily stored for two years and accessible to almost every authority. And only the violations are stored - but not every movement.
The Internet connection data goes far beyond what is associated with normal wiretapping permissions. Filesharing clients may establish connections to any computers - with which the owner may have nothing to do. Email communications, which are based only on sender and recipient, cannot always be distinguished from spam - viruses and spam, however, falsify addresses, which is why there will be endless garbage in these data swamps.
By the way, in none of the previous data collection cases are such gigantic amounts of junk data collected as in the now decided attack on privacy.
And above all: who protects the citizen from the misinterpretation of these data swamps?
Products - Flip4Mac WMV - maybe not quite as buggy as the toy player from MS. On the other hand - I hardly ever need a WMV player.