[Skybird]

The state, your worst enemy. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung writes:
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Cold-called BSI president: Did Arne Schönbohm get caught in the gears of power?

German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser wants to keep security loopholes open and use them, among other things, to monitor citizens. The cybersecurity agency doesn't want that.

When a senior official is removed from a top position, what you see is often not what actually happens. Arne Schönbohm was recently placed on forced leave as president of the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). Germany's Social Democratic Interior Minister Nancy Faeser chastised him for "damaged trust."

"What you see" was three events earlier. On Oct. 7, comedian Jan Böhmermann's program on public radio scandalized the alleged "closeness to Russia" of an association Schönbohm had founded before his tenure. The contents of the broadcast were old news. The second: On October 8, all train traffic in northern Germany was cancelled due to a targeted attack on two neuralgic points of the railroad infrastructure. Public discussion now turned to the security of the country's "critical infrastructure" and "cybersecurity." On Oct. 10, the interior minister barred Schönbohm from conducting official business and banned him from speaking. Cybersecurity is the BSI's core business.

Schönbohm did not let himself be disposed of quietly, however, but demanded disciplinary proceedings against himself. After all, he is convinced that there is nothing against him. And "trust" may be a valid reason for dismissal in the case of political officials, but not in the case of a regular civil servant like him - that would contradict the basic ideas of German civil service law. Schönbohm's complaint is now before the Cologne Administrative Court. Since the ministry had not been able to present any case against him by the deadline last Tuesday, it has been granted an extension of the deadline until December 9.

In order to take the complaint until then the ground, the employer Faeser tries it now with a transfer - such a thing must put up with civil servants as a rule, if the procedure is kept and they come on a at least equivalent post. According to reports, Schönbohm is to become president of the Federal Academy for Public Administration in Brühl.

Of course, this is not an equivalent post, as everyone in the Interior Ministry knows. It has a lower salary and is not comparable in terms of staff, money and powers. The BSI has about 1700 posts and an annual budget of 240 million euros; in the new office there would be a mere 55 employees, and the modest budget is 3.5 million euros. The pay has now been adjusted in a rush. The idea: if the transfer is successful, Schönbohm's complaint would be groundless. At present, however, things are not looking bad for him.

So what could be the motivation for Faeser's action if there is nothing against Schönbohm? The coalition agreement of the governing coalition states that the BSI should become "more independent" of the Ministry of the Interior. The German Informatics Society (Gesellschaft für Informatik) has just called on the federal government once again to implement this. But the ministry is making no effort to do so, as the coalition partners complain.

Is there perhaps no interest at all in a more "independent" BSI in the Ministry of the Interior? The Greens' proposal to make it completely independent was not open to discussion by the SPD during the coalition negotiations. The BSI is currently kept on a short leash by the ministry.

The predecessor organization of the BSI, founded in 1991, was the Central Office for Ciphering as part of the Federal Intelligence Service. Its task was exclusively to protect the state. Over time, new tasks were added for the BSI, including the protection of citizens and the economy.

But these two tasks contradict each other: If, for example, citizens are protected from security gaps in the operating systems of their cell phones by informing the manufacturers about them, this weakens the ability of government agencies to monitor citizens using these very security gaps. But that's what Faeser intends to do, for example, with chat control.

The BSI, under a self-confident president who has repeatedly emphasized the independence of his agency, thus inevitably gets in the way of a political apparatus that has expanded the legal possibilities of open or covert state surveillance in recent years with a wide variety of justifications.

The obvious thesis is: Schönbohm was deposed because he is interfering with this. At the same time, the issues are pressing, especially in the area of cybersecurity, and everything here is connected to everything else. The coalition agreement had promised a lot, but nothing has been tackled so far, complain the opposition and digital associations alike. Faeser herself has no digital expertise, and she has not brought in any experts to change that. Her office doesn't seem to care much about the coalition agreement; it's carrying on as before.

If Nancy Faeser becomes head of government in Hesse in less than a year's time, as many expect, and if Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht then succeeds her, the lack of digital expertise will remain. Here, too, the government's proclaimed "turnaround" urgently needs to be implemented.

Schönbohm is a CDU man. He was brought in from outside in 2016. He once said that he had taken on the job in order not to always complain about the state, but to do things better. The IT scene met him with skepticism when he took office, but Schönbohm has greatly upgraded the agency and gained respect. As is often the case when someone from the outside comes into an established and ultimately politically controlled apparatus, he did not have an easy time with the ministerial staff.
Knowing vulnerabilities means power

One point of contention is how to deal with security vulnerabilities. It's important to know that the state also employs hackers inside it. The German intelligence services - i.e., BND, Verfassungsschutz, Militärischer Abschirmdienst - are allowed to commit crimes, within the scope of legal powers, of course; this serves to protect the country's internal and external security. They are allowed to keep discovered security gaps secret and exploit them.

Faeser wants to keep it that way. Vulnerabilities are to be "managed," but not fixed in conjunction with manufacturers. Security vulnerabilities give power to those who know about them. Faeser and her security agencies have an overall tendency to distrust their own people, you might say. She also wants the state Trojan, chat controls, so-called hackbacks and data retention. Schönbohm, on the other hand, wanted to report security gaps to manufacturers - so that they can be closed. This puts him in line with the IT scene.

There one sees the work of the Minister of the Interior critically. "Faeser continues to disappoint and acts populistically instead of taking concrete measures to increase IT security," says, for example, Manuel Atug, founder and spokesman for AG Kritis, a group of experts concerned with the protection of critical infrastructures. Faeser, he says, is still calling for more powers for security agencies to put citizens at risk with broken encryption: "However, all these requests weaken overall security for all of us."
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Great. For keeping chat control to monitor unwanted opinions one actrively keeps open digital IT infrastructure prone and vulnerable to hostile as well as allies' digital spoying and sabotage operations.
But some people are wondering why I laugh about state standards for data security and do not trust governmental services.
Both the political left and right are enemies of freedom and liberty. Ther eis absolutely no differenc ebetween the two. Libertarians are their shared enemy number one - because they cannot corrupt him.