A minute of silence for the »secret of telecommunications«
A new law, to be passed today by the big coalition in Berlin will require providers of telecommunication (phone, voip, e-mail, internet access, anonymization services) to record and safe various connection data for six months. That data contains information about who communicates with who at what time, IP addresses, phone numbers, phone identifiers,... With access to that kind of data the state will be able to construct complete graphs of who knows who, who has been in touch with who at what time, how frequently, who owns which mobile phone, where has some mobile phone been during the last 6 months. Our entire life will be transparent to the government. Do you trust the government at all times? Do you trust any future government to grant it these rights? This law will shake up the fundamentals of our democracy. In 1983 the constitutional court of Germany once basically said Whoever is unable to know what someone knows about him is not sovereign. Those who aren't souvereign cannot be sovereigns. How much worth is our democracy without the sovereign, the people? No government ever should have the power to take that from us. It is happening right now, though, we are not the sovereign anymore - I'm depressed. :(