Re: No data retention in germany for donated services

[Hans Schnehl <torvallenator@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Dec 09, 2008 at 10:58:03AM +0100, Karsten N. wrote:
> Seth David Schoen schrieb:
> > NO DATA RETENTION FOR FREE-OF-CHARGE SERVICES
> > 
> >   Original German text of this article "Keine Vorratsdatenspeicherung für
> >   unentgeltliche Dienste" is available at
> > 
> >   http://www.daten-speicherung.de/index.php/keine-vorratsdatenspeicherung-fuer-unentgeltliche-dienste/ 
> > 
> >   Copyright 2008 Patrick Breyer; licensed under Creative Commons BY-2.0
> >   (Germany) license.
> > 
> >   http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/de/
> > 
> >   Translation by Seth Schoen.  This text version omits hyperlinks to the
> >   German text of laws, treaties, and court decisions which appear in-line
> >   in the original German version.
> 
> The article by Patrick Breyer and the translation by Seth Schoen gives
> the information about one main reason, why Tor nodes are not affected
> by the EU data retention an the German data retention law §113a TKG.
> 
> Supported by qualified lawyers, we have identified one or two more
> points, why tor nodes has to be data retention free, but these points
> are technical and more difficult to communicate with the judiciary.
> 
> So we ask the tor community, to keep tor non-commercial at all. If a
> commercial version of tor was online, it will be much more difficult
> in the next time, to fight against data retention in EU.
> 
> Yes, it is possible, to make a data retention law for donated services
> in EU too. But this will takes time. We can use this time, to make tor
> more robust against this attack.
> 
> We will keep the German tor admins and the board of torproject.org
> up-to-date about the lawyers expert opinion but with respect to the
> recommendation of the lawyers, we will not publish it at the moment.

This is great news for all Tornode operators in Germany, if it comes true
in the meaning of the local (german) jurisdiction has to accept this.
It saves German operators from having to chose between breaking anonymity
by loggging data or being criminalyzed, or art least heavily fined or
punished otherwise.
It also would save quite a lot of work and money to be spent for saving 
all the data. This would be, presuming it to become accepted, excellent.
Unfortunatelly it does not solve the problem, the mere fact traffic is
going to be logged and held for 6 months is the problem, not who does
the actual logging. So the necessary data will be easily obtained on 
request of executives from the isp's where nodes are hosted/running.
But it may keep up the number of nodes in that country.

Regards

Hans