After some back and forth I am not registered currently (grin) so I just write it here:

I would like to see a workshop on that topic. A lot of the people who are registered are either doing it themselves or providing services allowing others do to it: Move a part of their substantial communication into the internet. Substantial in the sense of: Making up your life. It's important to you.
While there certainly is an aspect of "if it's important it has to work", which would be interesting to explore (in terms of: How to make sure it works when the power fail[s/ed], the other question is:

If the States force providers of telephony and electronic communication to retain all the relevant data, it's easy to create ex-post a communication profile. If you add the location data from the Mobile Phone providers, you have a person bare-ass naked, over the barrel.

Constitutions in Europe contain(ed) provisions to protect the civilian from a nosy state (and opressive governments). In the name of fighting crime (terrorism, sexual abuse), states now become more and more addicted to "just get the data". Probably because a good number of politicians think the internet is somehow a big telefon conference or so. Whatever. And they succeeed, because the people who stand up to protect civil rights are directly or indirectly accused of supporting horrible crimes. You don't want the police to be able to listen to the telephone? You must be in favour of the terrorists! Or do you have anything to hide?

The result is that, in the apparent name of "the good", data gets collected of everybody (who is not advert enough to shade his communications). There will be a tool.

Now imagine we have this tool. Communications are traced. Like weapons, tools are neutral. They become bad or good as they are applied. However, for databases there's the rule that "it will be abused". And mainly because of its' neutrality.

The german parliament has passed a law on data retention. In brief, the law obliges Telcos, ISPs and Mail-Providers to retain data for six months.

"Data" is your name, the mere fact that you have a contract. Data is as well that you were connected to the internet. When, how long, with which IP address. That you called this and that mobile Phone number. That you tried to call it. That you sent a sms. That you connected to your mail server. When.

All this data is urgently needed by investigators to fight terrorism.

Well. As actually few terrorists have a residential DSL line in germany, the data pool comes in quite handy to track down people who commit as evil crimes as sharing music. We fully understand that, the music industry needs to protect their cold-war business model. Of course it's not lawful to copy music and give it to somebody else. But if anybody claims that it's a crime in the range of murder, I would be surprised.

What remains as a fact is that the privacy of every person communicating in or with somebody in germany is from the 1st of January 2009 on nonexistent anymore. For six months, whoever is interested will be able to analyze your network, track down where you have been (net-wise) and when.

That's not the end of the world, but it's a very significant turning point. Privacy Laws in germany have been set up to protect people from a state which wants to know too much. We had those states, two in the last century, and the constitution was a foundation to ensure civil rights - free speech, democracy, liberty.

It was - because it's been given up on November 9th by the parliament.

What does that mean for the future of the internet?