Das Buch Wer mitmacht, hat Recht!

Germany’s democracy just fell victimg to a classic lemming maneuver.
A formal request (read: “we sued them”) to make the testing protocols (which were the basis of approval for the Nedap voting machines) public was just denied by a German court.
Reasons? “Intellectual Property”.

And that’s even tho they are kown and proven to be as insecure as you can possibly imagine.
That reads “insecure” as in: “let’s accumulate security holes and sell them in an ugly gray box”.
Here’s a page of a Dutch activist group that also proved the blatant insecurities of the Nedap system.

Read the rest of the article after the jump!

Now you might be asking “Who’s stupid enough to approve hardware like that?”
Well, here in Germany devices like that need a “Betriebszulassung”, which roughly translates to “you can’t cut yourself using it, and it safe to touch it after you dropped it from 1 meter.”
Who’s better to judge devices based on raw physical properties than the master nerds of German physics at the PTB.

Yeah right. Now back to reality….
...Wait, what?! We’re already here!
Welcome to fucked up German reality!

German computer magazine c’t sued the PTB, using the German equivalent to the Freedom of Information Act (Informationsfreiheitsgesetz / IFG), to disclose the protocols of the test that originally resulted in said “Betriebszulassung” for the voting machines.
Well, now the court ruling is in, and I’m not the only one to be totally shocked about the outcome:

- Request to disclose protocols: DENIED – Reason: “Protection of intellectual property of Nedap” – For added humiliation of democracy: The information is so top secret, that only 3 (read: three, as in, one less than four) people at the PTB know the details of the report.

Even shorter:
The whole German democracy depends on the approval of three physicists.
No IT professionals, no hackers, no security experts, ... but three guys who measure how much tension a two-gauge copper wire holds up to and what the exact atomic-time for Germany is.

People like this approve a totally insecure machine that leaves no paper trail and is easily modified/hacked within seconds!

The whole article, which can be read in the latest issue of c’t magazine (2007/25, Pg. 52,53,54), makes you want to throw up right on the spot.
The ruling of the court is in perfect tune with current law, which gives ranks intellectual property of businesses above our democracy.
There is no room for discretion at all, this was seriously criticized when the law was about to get passed.
But no one listened!
“This will never be a problem, and if it will be, the highest court can always rule the law ineffective”.

Dear politicians: FUCK OPT-OUT SYSTEMS