Germany

The newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reports that the German spy agency BND will spend €28 million on what it calls its 'Strategic Technical Initiative' (SIT) next year, and that it has asked the German government for a further €300 million (original in German). The German edition of the English-language site "The Local" explains how the money will be used:

    The aim of the programme is to penetrate foreign social networks and create an early warning system for cyber attacks.

As early as June last year, Techdirt noted that beyond the political fallout of NSA spying, there is a considerable risk that there will be serious economic consequences too.

Things aren't looking positive for Google in Europe. After a high-profile judicial setback last week — in which a court found that Europeans can now request that information about them be 'forgotten' by the search engine— some politicians from the continent's largest economy are heating up the debate.

The U.S. and German governments remain far from an agreement on the appropriate level of surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency on German residents, leaders of both countries said Friday.

The two countries still have “differences of opinion to overcome” on the appropriate use of surveillance, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in a joint press conference with U.S. President Barack Obama. The two leaders met in Washington, D.C., this week to discuss political unrest in Ukraine and other issues.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has suggested that European countries should develop a communications network as part of an effort to improve data protection.

The plans would form part of a strategy to counter the mass surveillance conducted by the US National Security Agency (NSA), GCHQ and other nations' security services.

We already find the concept of "secondary liability" when it comes to copyright troubling enough. It's worrisome when a third party who had no direct involvement in the actual infringement can be blamed for it. Yet, in the legacy entertainment industry's insane infatuation with stopping all infringement, they keep going further up the chain, past secondary liability into tertiary or possibly even quaternary liability -- blaming those further and further removed from the actual infringement.

A group of hackers and a human rights organization are suing the German government for allegedly conducting illegal spying activities and aiding the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

The Nokia smartphone name is dead, but it may live on as a German zombie. A team of German hackers want to revive the Nokia N900. They want to tear out its motherboard and give it a new, more powerful, and more open-source one instead. They’re calling it Neo900.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel complained to President Barack Obama on Wednesday after learning that U.S. intelligence may have targeted her mobile phone, saying that would be "a serious breach of trust" if confirmed.

 A German government infosec agency has warned that using Windows 8 in conjunction with the Trusted Computing security platform could lead to loss of control over IT solutions for users.

The advice comes from the federal Bundesamt for Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik IT security agency, which issued a German-language document stating that new Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chips built into computers working in conjunction Windows 8 put the devices under Microsoft's control, with users having no control over what can and cannot be installed on them.