Enlarge image
Photo:
Jens Schlueter / Getty Images
In Germany there is something that many other countries cannot offer and, as strange as that may sound, it has to do with digitization.
One of the oldest digital civil rights organizations recently turned forty, which is an eternity in digital technology.
It's called the Chaos Computer Club (CCC).
This long tradition of political engagement with digital technology and networking gave rise to values early on that today have to be called “traditional”.
You can still find them under the heading "Hacker Ethics" on the CCC website: There are eight basic principles, six of which come from the historical non-fiction book "Hackers - Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by US journalist Steven Levy, supplemented by two rules that CCC founder Wau Holland came up with in the eighties.
These eight commandments conjure up an idealistic, optimistic spirit, the spirit of a free, fair digital world in which "computers can create art and beauty" and "computers change your life for the better".
Preserving traditional values
A policy that is based on such ideals should actually be called conservative network policy, after all it is about preserving traditional values.
Forty years after the founding of the CCC, these values seem to guide the plans of a future federal government for the first time.
So there should now be conservative, value-oriented network politics in Germany.
The fact that this could really happen has a lot to do with staff.
To illustrate this, here are two commandments from the "hacker ethics":
"All information must be free."
"Use public data, protect private data."
And here are a few sentences from the traffic light coalition agreement:
"We set open standards for public IT projects."
"We are introducing a legal right to open data and are improving the data expertise of public bodies."
"We promote anonymization techniques, create legal security through standards and introduce the criminal liability of illegal de-anonymization."
Here is another of Wau Holland's sentences:
"Don't litter other people's data."
And here are a few more from the coalition agreement:
"We are introducing the right to encryption, effective vulnerability management with the aim of closing security gaps, and the provisions› security-by-design / default ‹."
»The identification, reporting and closing of security gaps in a responsible process, e.
B. in IT security research, should be legally feasible.
We generally reject hackbacks as a means of cyber defense. "
Open standards, open source, real end-to-end encryption, a ban on facial recognition in public spaces, broadband expansion, a ban on automated assessment by learning machines, funding for games and start-ups - read the chapter on "Digital Innovation and Digital Infrastructure" to a large extent like an old Christmas wish list of German network activists.
Network activist - so far this has been an activity in Germany for people with an extremely high tolerance for frustration.
One must recall these lists of ministers
One must not forget that the list of German interior ministers for the past 16 years looks like this: Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU), Thomas de Maizière (CDU), Hans-Peter Friedrich (CSU), Thomas de Maizière (CDU), Horst Seehofer (CSU) ).
Since there was a Ministry for "Transport and Digital Infrastructure", since 2013, the ministers have been Alexander Dobrindt (CSU), Christian Schmidt (CSU) and Andreas Scheuer (CSU).
It doesn't take more than these names to illustrate all the misery.
The colossal failure of the Merkel years in terms of digitization and digital civil rights is above all the failure of the Union parties (supported by the weakness of the Social Democrats).
Although the FDP did not cover itself with fame in the black-yellow coalition and prevented a broadband universal service, with which there might be fewer blank spots on the network map today.
Careful relief
16 years of Merkel, that was a leaden, paralyzing time for the digital world. Time and again, governments passed network laws that the Constitutional Court then had to collect. In these 16 years, network policy has almost always been: surveillance, control and repression policy. The cause-free mass surveillance by NSA and Co. was sat out, the broadband expansion overslept, digital games demonized, hackers criminalized across the board, digital platforms first ignored and then regulated helplessly and toothless.
Now Markus Beckedahl, founder of the blog Netzpolitik.org and a network activist for almost 20 years, writes in a comment on the coalition agreement: “We live in exciting times.
But now there is a little more hope that our many years of work will finally pay off and a more livable digital society appears more possible. "The coalition agreement contains" numerous sentences that one would like to sign. "
Cautious relief is paired with the skepticism of those who have been fighting the same, very frustrating battle for many years.
Is the digital generation conflict really over?
Why you should take this seriously
Sure: What is in a coalition agreement is first and foremost just a promise.
But this promise is now at least coming from people who can be believed to mean business, right across the coalition parties.
more on the subject
Dispute over Internet filters: The C64 generation strikes backBy Christian Stöcker
In fact, the biggest antagonists within the Dreierbund, the Greens and the FDP, are probably nowhere closer than on the subject of digital civil rights.
In Germany there has been a kind of informal, non-partisan club of desperate digital politicians for many years, whose ideas repeatedly failed because of the lead ministers from the CDU and CSU.
Some of them were now sitting together in the “Digital Innovation and Digital Infrastructure” working group.
Do you know him?
You all know each other from bodies such as the “Digital Agenda” committees, the Enquete Commissions for Artificial Intelligence and “Internet and Digital Society”, the NSA committee of inquiry.
Jens Zimmermann, for example, was previously the digital policy spokesman for the SPD and is a fan of digital sport.
Two of the most prominent digitization experts of the SPD are missing from the group because they were needed elsewhere: Their names are Saskia Esken and Lars Klingbeil.
advertisement
Stocker, Christian
We are the experiment: our world is changing so breathtakingly that we stagger from crisis to crisis.
We have to learn to manage this tremendous acceleration.
Published by Karl Blessing Verlag
Number of pages: 384
Published by Karl Blessing Verlag
Number of pages: 384
Buy for € 22.00
Time of price inquiry
11/28/2021 10:18 p.m.
No guarantee
Order from Amazon
Order from Thalia
Order from Weltbild
Product reviews are purely editorial and independent.
Via the so-called affiliate links above, we usually receive a commission from the dealer when making a purchase.
More information here
The Green Malte Spitz became internationally known in 2009 because he had the cell phone data stored on him by OpenDataCity and "ZEIT" evaluated and published. Today he is Secretary General of the civil rights organization "Society for Freedom Rights".
Jan-Philipp Albrecht is one of the architects of the EU General Data Protection Regulation, Anna Christmann is an excellently networked specialist in artificial intelligence.
With Manuel Höferlin, the FDP sent a digital political veteran to the negotiating group who has been campaigning for digital civil rights for many years and has founded the "intergroup parliamentary group" for eSports and gaming, one of these informal meeting places for digital politicians.
His group colleague Mario Brandenburg comes from SAP.
The name of another FDP negotiator may sound familiar to you, and his presence in this group says perhaps most clearly how far away from the Merkel years German digital policy could be in the next four years: Bernd Schlömer was once the national chairman of the Pirate Party.
