A few highlights:
- Instead of "providing an internet-based service", the crime is now "facilitating access to an internet-based service".
- It is no longer a requirement that access to the service be restricted.
- The law now applies to all crimes, rather than just the specific crimes that were listed before.
I'm confused by the fact that the document you linked to is labeled "recommendation". The recommended changes are indeed much, much broader than the original draft and have me worried. However, I must admit that I do not know if these recommendations are changes that will be applied unconditionally or not. I am not familiar enough with the procedures within the Bundesrat.
Does that include cafes that provide internet access to customers?
Otherwise they would outlaw bitcoin scramblers also, which is mostly used for illegal, not privacy purposes.
What is bonkers is now the recommendation of the lead legal council and some committee on internal affairs to broaden the wording to "facilitating access" which could be interpretated as anything, and thus will not pass any critical review by law. Those guys just need to be fired.
Der Entwurf zielt darauf, das Betreiben von auf die Förderung illegaler Zwecke ausgerichteten Plattformen unabhängig von dem Nachweis der Beteiligung an einzelnen konkreten Handelsgeschäften unter Strafe zu stellen.
My translation:
The draft aims to penalize the operation of platforms directed at supporting illegal activities, independent of proof of participation in individual specific trades.
I.e. the law is drafted to close a loophole where you can open a black market site, lovingly curate illegal goods into categories and offer your escrow services to potential customers, but you can only be prosecuted once the police can find someone who actually used your service. Instead, they'd prefer to be able to shut it down beforehand.
All in all, I'm not too worried that the law will be passed in a form that outlaws operating Tor nodes.
The point is that the law says any Tor onion service market is illegal, by definition.
And it's obviously only a first step before outlawing anonymization for the general public, including a ban on encryption.
The whole point of legal jargon is to say things in an airtight way. You cannot summarize legal jargon without removing the airtight-ness—lawyers really do use as few words as they can manage to get a concept across (in a loophole-less manner), so removing any single word further usually reintroduces a loophole. This implies that there is no point whatsoever in trying to poke holes in a law you only understand through summary, since it is vanishingly unlikely that the holes that appear in the summary appear in the law. You have to read the actual text.
But at least in the United States, very many of the sentences in our laws end with weasel phrases like "or similar uses" and "or other software" and "or related activity", which is exactly where the problem arises, and where interested parties are inserting their own special loopholes. And sure, we hope that these loopholes get hammered out in the courts in our favor some years later -- that is, if there happens to be a good and willing samaritan that is more "invested" in taking the issue to court to try for an outcome which is favorable for the public versus one favorable to corporations or the police or the wealthy. But I'll just go ahead and continue supporting the option where the stupid law isn't created in the first place. Even if that means the police don't get their bogey man running a dark market.
(Admittedly, some are not. But law written by teams of legislators with centuries of combined legal experience—and passed through dozens of third-party QC checks + redraftings before being submitted for consideration—usually does not have this problem. Or, if it does, then usually it is an "out-of-context problem" nobody could see coming—an interpretation that wouldn't have even made sense to consider at time of drafting—and the first time anyone hits the relevant snag, we get some equally-good lawyers [e.g. the US Supreme Court, for US-Constitution out-of-context problems] in a room to re-interpret the law.)
Again, read the text. Is there "generic language" or "a loophole" you could find with ten minutes' close scrutiny, that can't be explained away as "fully pinned down in meaning by case-law" by an average civil lawyer from that country? I doubt it. But might it somehow allow for the trampling of your civil liberties anyway, for reasons that only become clear when you know all the case-law required to macro-expand the law out to its fullest reading, and the totality of the body of law and statute of the relevant country, and the case-laws of their individual interactions? Maybe.
I think, I am smart when it comes to web and software, but I know little about electricity or cooking or 1000 other things. The people, you call smart, proposed to place stop-signs in the web - which sounds good and familiar to general public, but stupid to people who knows how web works. It is not enough to be smart.
Whether the effect they want is a sensible effect—that has nothing to do with whether they're clever.
A person with a genie in a bottle is normally just "doomed", because genies exploit loopholes. If the person is an experienced, clever lawyer, though, then they're not doomed; they're actually quite powerful. That doesn't mean they'll use their wishes to accomplish anything good for the world, or even good for them personally. They're still a regular, irrational human being with irrational desires—desires for status among their peers, for adoration and worship by the public, for renown and legacy. Etc.
I'm pretty sure that the people who proposed to "place stop-signs in the web" knew what they were doing, and knew what it would accomplish, and wanted to accomplish exactly what the law-as-drafted would accomplish if signed into law. "But it would just make everything worse!" Not for them. Not for their voter-base, at least from the perspective of voting for them again. Not for their lobbyists. Etc. It might make the Internet work objectively worse—but whoever said that politics was about making things better? Regulation mostly serves to make various processes more inefficient and to give those processes higher barriers-to-entry—in a way that makes them safer, or less prone to abuse, or whatever else. Politicians are always thinking in that mode: "something might get worse, but it's a compromise for everyone else—some good, some bad—and a win for me personally!"
Clarification: "money forgery" would refer to counterfeiting, where I might print up a bunch of notes that look like $100 bills and spend them as if the government had printed them. "Money laundering" would refer to disguising the origins of some money, where I might report a pile of cash that came from illicit drug sales as cash receipts from the convenience store I conveniently (see) happen to own.
It's hard for me to imagine how you'd use Tor to forge money, although I guess it might be involved in your scheme to hack into your bank and increase the value of your account(s) there. What kind of money-related acts are enumerated?
I think the list covers trading in counterfeit money as well. This is something that you can totally do over the internet.
But see the reply linking to the newer recommendation document. This one recommends to remove the restriction to a set list of crimes and is generally much looser.
Yeah right. That’s what they always say these laws will be used for, but they always end up being used for much broader purposes.
[1] https://www.bundesrat.de/SharedDocs/drucksachen/2019/0001-01...