News - German government admits planting trojan to spy on citizens

[HEXUS]

Pressure from hacker group causes German officials to admit planting "R2D2" trojan.

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[shaithis]

Wow....just WOW!

Absolutely despicable....I can hardly believe it...

[mycarsavw]

Is this the same Germany who kicked up a fuss about letting Google carry out full Streetview coverage citing "privacy issues"?

[Saracen]

Is this the same Germany who kicked up a fuss about letting Google carry out full Streetview coverage citing "privacy issues"?

But that's different ...... it wasn't them doing it.

I agree utterly with shaithis, except for the last four words ...... it's utterly despicable, all right. But I absolutely do believe it. I'm just surprised no major Western government has been at it and/or caught at it (delete as applicable) before.

[Andeh13]

I bet most governments are doing it, most just manage to avoid being caught! My opinion is if your planning on doing something really nasty and they have genuine reasons to suspect it, then I say let them spy on you as much as they want (within reason) to make sure you can be stopped.

Hell, as long as they don't steal my money or feed my advertisements they can watch what i'm doing on the internet as much as they want. Chances are its exactly the same as what 80% of like minded men are doing....just for the love of God don't let me girlfriend see it!

[TheAnimus]

Isn't this subject to the same legal issues as getting a wire tap in the UK?

Also isn't one the main concerns that this leaves a few gaping vulnerabilities on the 'users' machine, due to the sloppy nature of the trogen, it should have been very simple to have public private key cyrpto for issuing commands, but they didn't apparently.....

Thou I think I read somewere, maybe duck's post, that this is actually illegal in germany because of the lack of care taken on the host machine.