Tonnerre Lombard

The petition against censorship which was filed to the German parliament from April 24th, 2009 has finally passed the 100’000 signers. On June 4th, 12 days before the end of the petition, 110’298 people have signed it.

The powers that be however decided to ignore the petition so far. Apart from a lapsus of the German minister of economy, von Gutenberg, who declared that everybody who was against censorship is a pedophile, none of the politicians of the social democrats (SPD) or the christian union (CDU), the governing parties in Germany, has mentioned the petition in any way. Family minister Ursula von der Leyen, who is currently campaining for her reelection, even removed the time for questions from her campaign events.

Since the petition has passed the necessary limit of 50’000 signers, the petition committee of the German parliament will at least have to consider it. The result of this will be very interesting.

In case Az. 5 C314/06 against the Federal Ministry of Justice, the District Court of Berlin Central has decided that all retained data must be deleted by the end of the contract with the customer. According to the judges, retention of data even beyond the contract period is a violation of the right to informational self-determination.

It has been a couple of days already, but on November 9th, around noon (finally not in a midnight session!), the German Parliament has adopted the law on data retention (VDS: Vorratsdatenspeicherung) with a lower limit of 6 monthes of retention. This legislation requires all connection metadata to be saved for 6 monthes before they may get deleted.

During the vote, which was held around noon, the parliament was an astonishingly empty place. This legislation, which can serve to turn Germany into a surveillance state, did not even raise enough interest among the parliamentarians to cause a significant majority of them to vote on the issue, which is a rather sad thing.

According to the German federal police, there is «no alternative» to the data retention policy. The same argument could be applied to death row, so it is utterly worthless as an argument.

I invite everyone who has talked to his local parliamentarian in Germany to have a word with him about why he did not appear in Parliament or why he voted in favor of the proposal (if so): have a look at the voting list for the German data retention law.

Not all is lost

But there is still a way to influence the legislation even after it has been passed. The Arbeitskreis Vorratsdatenspeicherung has a press release on their preparation of legal action against the law. According to the Arbeitskreis Vorratsdatenspeicherung, the legislation is in disagreement with the German constitution and thus cannot be adopted as it has been presented right now.

And the Arbeitskreis Datenspeicherung is not alone with this opinion: Parliamentarians of the Socialist Party (SPD) mentioned that they also don’t think the law is compatible with the constitution, but expressed that the Constitutional Court would take care of it.