Because the interior ministers want to store connection data for one year. And the demands are very far-reaching:
The interior ministers' conference, meeting under the motto "Mit Sicherheit was los" (With certainty something is going on), expressed its support at its meeting on Friday in Stuttgart for a minimum twelve-month retention of telephone and internet data by telecommunications providers. The security experts, who consider this measure, which deeply encroaches on fundamental rights, particularly necessary in cyberspace.
The fact that this data desert violates data protection regulations and has so far always been rejected by the Bundestag is completely irrelevant to the interior ministers. And Schily already has concrete plans on how to circumvent this hurdle:
The SPD politician referred in Stuttgart to the plans for the blanket surveillance of users, which the national government representatives in Brussels are currently pushing forward via the EU Council, disregarding the EU Parliament. This involves obliging providers to retain all connection and location data for months and years, which arise during the provision of services such as telephoning, emailing, SMS sending, surfing, chatting or file sharing.
A very simple solution - let's use the undemocratic EU decisions, where a government can decide without the Bundestag. The federal government has already set an example with software patents. And then one can subsequently refer to the fact that one is merely implementing EU law. It may have nothing to do with democracy, but who cares. Democracy doesn't interest Otto Orwell and his colleagues anymore anyway.
Also nice to see how the interior ministers deal with the - justified - criticism:
Concerns from civil rights activists that the retention of data would mean that all electronic communication of people is monitored and that users are placed under a disproportionate general suspicion were dismissed by Rech. In his opinion, the term "glass citizen" is "overused".
If necessary, the data protection officers will simply be gagged, as Otto Orwell has already tried to do. The fact that the economy is massively against it because it will cause disproportionately high costs is also irrelevant to them. Absurd decisions in the name of alleged security and alleged malice of the internet have even stood up in court - as can be seen from the absurd blocking orders of the Düsseldorf government presidency. Fortunately, one is still allowed to report on it, as a court has recently ruled. For now. Otto will surely come up with something ...
The network must "not degenerate into a lawless space," explained Rech, referring to the often expressed fear of security politicians about allegedly unregulated online areas.
Sorry, but if the interior ministers' efforts succeed, the internet is a lawless space. Free from the right to informational self-determination. Free from data protection. Free from proportionality of means.
For me, one thing follows quite clearly: the focus on the user-friendliness of projects like gnupg, tor and mixmaster must be significantly increased on the client side, so that we have a chance at all to protect ourselves from this data collection mania of the interior ministers. Unless one wants to find one's own movement profile on the internet publicly available for download at some point or explain to the nice gentleman from the domestic intelligence service why one was on the left-wing radical website ...