> On 4 Mar 2015, at 07:24, Ingo Klöcker <kloec...@kde.org> wrote:
> After the recent terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels some German > politicians are again arguing that we need Vorratsdatenspeicherung (data > retention, i.e. storage of all communication meta data for 6 months) in > Germany to prevent such attacks. Obviously, 99.9999999 % of this data will be > completely unrelated to terrorist attacks, i.e. totally clean as you put it. > You'd have statistically better odds by arresting random people on suspicion > of terror. Still this completely pants-on-head absurd policy will become > reality if those German politicians get what they want. > In Australia this idea, unfortunately, may become reality - a proposed change to existing laws to require companies to retain metadata is being debated in parliament, although public opinion is against data retention. Hopefully this change will fail. Once such a data retention law is in place it is dangerous because inevitably there is a “mission creep” that sets in - it is not hard to imagine one day that encryption software users, maybe GPG users, will be required to disclose information about the way they use it. I think in the UK recently the PM made some ambiguous comments which can be interpreted as seeking a ban on end-to-end encryption software by private users on the grounds that terrorists benefit just as much as ordinary law-abiding citizens from using encryption. Of course this shows he just does not understand the issues involved and this idea will not go anywhere. Sandeep Murthy s.mur...@mykolab.com _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
