[liberationtech] German police monitors Skype, GoogleMail and Facebook chat

[Anne Roth]

The German government a while ago answered questions about expenditures
by the federal ministry of home affairs for private service providers –
hardly noticed by the English speaking world. The parlamentary enquiry
(“Minor interpellation”) no. 17/10077 by Jan Korte, MP of The Left
party, has now been translated into English.

The answers were far more detailed than one would expect.

There’s 43 pages (this includes questions), 20 of which are tables that
list who was contracted, how much money was paid, what for and how each
paid item was used.

The German ministry for home affairs and thus the German police clearly
state that they are monitoring Skype, Google Mail, MSN Hotmail, Yahoo
Mail and Facebook chat if deemed necessary. Money is spent on trojan
viruses and we can be quite certain which company produces the IMSI
catchers used by German police. We know how much money was spent by the
Federal Police on border control biometrics, on passenger information
systems and telecommunications surveillance. Digitask, a company whose
reputation was clearly damaged after its trojan virus was found and
analysed by the Chaos Computer Club in 2011, seems to still be a regular
contractor of German authorities. Altogether more than a billion Euro
was spent on private services by German police and other public
authorities in the realm of the ministry of home affairs in the years
2002 – 2012.

A slightly longer version of this plus the pdf can be found here:
http://annalist.noblogs.org/post/2012/10/03/german-police-monitors-skype-googlemail-and-facebook-chat/


Best,
Anne

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