World's largest Internet exchange sues Germany over mass surveillance | Hacker News Reader

World's largest Internet exchange sues Germany over mass surveillance

theregister.co.uk

125 pointsSami_Lehtinen13 comments

It's interesting to note that DE-CIX, before filing this lawsuit, hired the former President of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany Hans-Jürgen Papier, who is very respected, to evaluate the legality of BND's practice at the DE-CIX. His findings were crushing. Now going into court against the foreign-intelligence agency with the assessment of such a highly respected judge is probably the best strategy you could come up with. I wish them best luck!

Wow. Good on DE-CIX.

Meanwhile in the U.S., AT&T executives have permitted mass governmental surveillance through their network for decades, even before the Patriot Act, even before national security letters. AT&T never made a single public complaint about the surveillance, and for all we know, they were eager participants.

A minor detail: The name AT&T applies to three different companies:

* 1885-1983: Generally known today as the monopoly phone company for the United States. (I don't know when the monopoly began or its geographic extent.)

* 1983-2005: Long distance company, after the breakup of the monopoly. AFAIK, it had been one small part of the much larger former monopoly.

* 2005-present: The former Southwestern Bell Corp (SBC), which bought the above company and took on its name and branding.

You're right that the name AT&T has undergone big changes in what it refers to, esp. with the breakup of the Bell System in 1983/1984. But the old AT&T set the culture for all of the present day phone companies in dealings with the government.

Well, in Germany many people alive do remember what mass governmental surveillance entails. In Germany, STASI is not a metaphor for an abstract threat of authoritarianism. It is something that everybody born in the east before the 1990 had to deal with.

Has anyone more information on the german secret court referenced in the article? As a german this is my first time hearing about that.

It's said to be a new control/review committee, probably without the rule to be transparent, and hasn't been created yet. As the article says it's already deemed unconstitutional before it even started.

German source: "Die Kontrolle soll stattdessen nur noch nachlaufend durch ein neues Spezialgremium erfolgen." https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/NSA-Skandal-und-BND-...

Update: the existing control committees for G10 (article 10 of Grundgesetz = German constitution) are staffed with members of the parliament and one has to be lawyer. I don't think that makes it a court, maybe it's just a matter of translation.

German source on G10 committees https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artikel_10-Gesetz#Verfahren

If the committee performs a judicial review which in this context I am understanding it does it is technically a "court".

It's not a judicial review, the PKG (parliamentary control committee) and the G10 Kommittee, which is a subset of the PKG, both consist of members of Parliament, and they do the same work (keeping an eye on the executive branch's work) - just for efforts whose information is considered too sensitive for wider distribution.

My german is a bit rusty but doesn't "gerichtlicher prüfung" translates into "court examination" or more precisely "judicial review"?

The Wikipedia article states (correctly) that there is no judicial review in the usual case. The parliamentary committee does not perform that.

"Die anstelle gerichtlicher Prüfung des Sachverhalts vorgesehenen politischen Kontrollgremien haben sich in der Vergangenheit aber oft als unzulänglich erwiesen:"

translates to (while keeping the sentence structure the same as much as possible, even if that sounds a bit off in english):

"The, in place of judicial review of the factual matter, arranged political control committees have shown in the past to often be insufficient:"

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