Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

This demo is initiated and backed by a number of organizations in Germany, among others the Arbeitskreis Vorratsdatenspeicherung, Chaos Computer Club e.V., FoeBuD e.V., STOP1984, Attac AG Wissensallmende, Indymedia Germany, and the German Pirate Party.

Place: Bielefeld, Germany (exact meeting place)
Time: 15:00 o'clock on Friday, October 20, 2006
Motto: Freiheit statt Angst (Freedom instead of fear)

Goals and Demands

• Reduce the pervasive surveillance in Germany!
  No public video surveillance, no automatical face-recognition, no data retention, no RFID and biometry in passports, no "Lauschangriff" etc.
• In-depth investigations of current surveillance laws by independant organizations/experts!
  Find out how effective (or rather not!) currently implemented surveillance laws have been, and what their downsides, problems, and dangers are for democracy in Germany.
• Stop all plans for further surveillance laws!
  Any further surveillance laws, "anti-terror"- or "security"-laws must be halted immediately! Their implications are extremely dangerous for privacy and democracy in Germany!

Materials: Banners, flyers, mottos for transparents and more are available in the wiki of the site. Donations are possible and welcome, too.

Demo participants can visit the Big Brother Awards 2006 right after the demo (for free).

If you value your privacy and democracy in this country, now is the time to speak up and let the whole world (and especially the German politicians) know! This surveillance-madness has to stop!

If there are electronic voting machines where you live, and you've ever considered using one of those... well, you should probably reconsider.

In this CNN report (M4V video, 13 MB) Avi Rubin explains why voting machines are a really, really bad idea. To quote some issues raised in the video:

• There's no way for voters to verify that their votes were recorded correctly.
• There's no way to count votes in a publicly viewable fashion.
• Meaningful recounts are impossible.
• Machines must be trusted not to fail (and we all know that computers never fail, right? ... right?).
• The Diebold machines contain gross design and programming errors (a detailed analysis is available).
• The quality of voting machines cannot be determined, because their code is proprietary (closed systems can never be trusted, especially so in such important scenarios)

The CCC Berlin has a very detailed analysis of the topic (German), with many links to further articles.

I'd recommend everyone to not use voting machines at all, but rather perform traditional pen-and-paper voting, if you value your vote... Also, make sure to inform relatives and friends about the risks of voting machines, and complain to your local responsible authorities, and ask them to remove these unreliable, insecure machines.

Update 2006-09-18: Just in case you thought that maybe you can trust the Diebold machines after all - their locks can be opened with a standard hotel minibar key.

(via The Lunatic Fringe)

Weee! The long awaited video recordings of last year's Chaos Communication Congress (22C3) are finally available via Bittorrent.

There is a full mirror available, and others may soon appear in the 22C3 wiki.

(via sicherheitsschwankung.de)

I'm heading towards Berlin in a few hours in order to attend 22C3. I'm not sure if/when I'll be able to blog or read/answer emails there, but I'll be back in a few days...

Oops. Engadget reports that Play-Doh fingers can fool 90% of all fingerprint scanners. This is nothing really new. The remarkable thing is that more and more companies and government organizations rely on such biometric authentication. Now, they all have been told about the problems, but nobody seems to want to listen...

(via Techdirt)