CCC | Open letter: Together against state-sponsored hacking

In an open letter, an overwhelmingly broad alliance opposes the German government's legislative plans, which would greatly expand the permission to infect computers and devices with state sponsored trojans and at the same time weaken encryption measures.

There are only a few legislative proposals where everyone simply agrees that these are really bad ideas. The coalition of the CDU, CSU and SPD managed to come up with even two of such on its wish list for the end of the legislative period:

With the Gesetz zur Anpassung des Verfassungsschutzrechts (Law on the Adaptation of the Protection of the Constitution), all German intelligence services are to be given a right to hack devices at will.

The update to the Bundespolizeigesetz (Federal Police Act) is intended not only to allow the agency to use so-called "state trojans" – a state-sponsored backdoor –, but also to allow it to hack people who have not committed or are suspected of committing a crime.

However, even the excessive extension of trojan horse deployments is not enough: Internet service providers are to be obliged to cooperate in the infection of their customers' devices. Apparently, end-to-end encrypted messengers in particular are to be actively weakened.

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