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A comment on German government answers questions about contracts to build monitoring software.

Re:German government answers questions about contracts to bu... by linhat on Wednesday October 03, 2012 @09:46AM (#4607336)
Linkbait? Nothing really new here, they 'released' their trojan a while ago, it's been found 'in the wild', the CCC disassembled it. They found MAJOR problems within it, e.g. crypto was a joke. They actually released their own control tool for it [1](GERMAN). Then they found the 'update' capability which basically allowed a loyal servant (or an attacker) to upload and execute whatever they choose to do so.

What drives me mad is ALL OF THIS was paid by federal taxes (not so sure about the 'Billion Euros', but most likely a lot) and all they got was something close to NetBus/SubSeven/Back Orifice (last one developed in 1998!!!). Digitask (a complete joke) is still employed by us and sadly (or maybe luckily) there has been happening not much since then on that front. Politicians keep blaming somebody else and apparently NOBODY outside Digitask has EVER had the chance to analyze the original source code of it (which is in itself a complete hoax). Best of it all, apparently, this entire 'program' has so far not yielded a SINGLE success story.

[1] http://ccc.de/de/updates/2011/staatstrojaner

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:German government answers questions about contracts to bu... by _joe on Wednesday October 03, 2012 @01:36PM (#4608601)
As noblogs.org is completely no-profit, and anonymous as much as possible, and does not contain ads, linkbait is not an option :)

Of course, this isn't anything new for some audience, but I think that is an indipendent media blog, so the story can still fit its audience.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:German government answers questions about contracts to bu... by annalist on Wednesday October 03, 2012 @04:32PM (#4609547)
The post isn't mainly about the trojan but about what else the government admits doing. Yes, it's no secret that Skype, Facebook, Gmail are monitored, but who knew for sure and how much money is spent on that? If you take it for granted that surveillance can happen everywhere all the time: no news. If you're interested in the details: I'd say that wasn't public before.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:German government answers questions about contracts to bu... by annalist on Wednesday October 03, 2012 @04:34PM (#4609553)
The 'billion euros' are in the document that's in the post. You can just add the sums mentioned.
[ Parent | on HN ]