Stasi 2.0

A former colleague of mine, who was a citizen of GDR until the bitter end, once made a comment to me along the lines that "compared to the technology available now, the tools methods the Stasi had available to them were like children's toys", and every Stasi Museum is full of exhibits which might have been vaguely high-tech around 1972. Data processing revolved around index cards, and the one main-frame computer I have seen probably had about the same processing power as a modern-day digital camera.

Now, of course, we are living in the Age of Terror, and anyone is a potential terrorist (me! you! the little old lady across the landing!), and the Internet is an ideal place for sharing all those bomb-building plans and coordinating hijacking activities. So wouldn't it be a good idea if you could check up on people's computers (bona-fide suspects and anyone sharing the same surname initials only, of course) to see if they're up to no good (logging on to alqaeda.net, downloading burkha porn etc. etc.)? As you've seen from the movies, all it takes is a couple of hacker-type (good) guys to type frantically for about 2 minutes, and already they're logged on to the suspect's computer and have found the detailed 3d wire frame model of the bomb.

So, the computer boffins in the Federal Interior Ministery (proprietor: Wolfgang Schäuble) have come up with a couple of brillo wheezes. Like a law which would allow the BKA (Bundeskriminalamt, sort of like the FBI) to sneak into people's computers without having to get any of those tedious warrants etc. They've come up with a simple solution which will avoid them having to employ any hackers from Hollywood: just have the suspects download a "trojan horse" style program which will sneak itself into the inner workings of the computer and start collecting data right away. This has become jokingly known as the "Bundestrojaner" (Federal Trojan), as anyone who has any idea of computers is having a good laugh about it.

Firstly, they're going to have to find a program or variants thereof which will work on the wide range of operating systems available out there. One which will fly below the radar of all anti-virus software and the like, and which will be able to comb through the vast amount of data on modern hard drives without causing suspiscion ("what is this bkamonitor.exe process which is slowing my system down?")

Then they will have to get it to the bad guys. The current thinking is that they will send a fake official email with the program as an attachment, which the bad guy will unthinkingly click on, and already his every keypress will be winging its way to the BKA supercomputer.

Then there's the slight problem of the legal validity of any data collected by such methods, as there's no way to prove forensically that it hasn't been manipulated. And a whole load of issues such as what if the bad guys (or another nation's "good guys") work out how the software works and use it for their own nefarious purposes.

And finally there's another slight problem in that any terrorist with half-a-brain will store their bomb-making plans on a computer which isn't connected to the Internet, and excercise the same level of caution any normal person or business (not however German government departments) would use if they don't want their communications to be intercepted by the FBI or the Chinese government.

Some useful links on the general subject of data protection or the increasing lack of:
http://www.bundestrojaner.de/
http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
http://www.dataloo.de/stasi-20-525.html
http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/inhalt/stasi.html