German watchdog says Amazon cloud vulnerable to US snooping

US legislation means Washington could seek access to sensitive police data that Germany plans to store with Amazon Web Services.

April, 2019. BERLIN — Amazon’s cloud hosting services are not suitable for storing German police data due to a risk of U.S. snooping, Germany’s top data protection officer told POLITICO.

Ulrich Kelber, Germany’s federal commissioner for data protection and freedom of information, said that U.S. authorities could invoke the CLOUD Act to demand access to data held by Amazon Web Services — creating a risk for German government bodies that store data with them.

The CLOUD Act, passed last year by Donald Trump’s administration, allows American authorities to compel U.S.-based tech companies to provide requested data, regardless of whether that data is stored in the U.S. or abroad.

In Germany, a tendency to know-it-all is spreading. That could be politically dangerous

NZZ. December 2022. Germans don’t tend towards extremism – actually. But in the political and media sphere, know-it-alls and paternalism are increasingly noticeable. Contempt for the normal is a cause for concern.

For a long time, modern Germany was not a country to worry about from a democratic point of view. According to a study by the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion from this year, 25 percent of Germans place themselves exactly in the middle of the democratic opinion spectrum; 36 percent slightly to the left, 29 percent slightly to the right of this center. That’s 90 percent between center-left and center-right. Actually calming.

Information Hoarding syndrome

Hoarding has become a pretty popular term lately, and more people are familiar with this psychological syndrome. It’s become popular on lifestyle magazines, self-help psychology websites, a few TV shows (remember the hoarding woman who didn’t even notice the dead body in the chaos of her house on CSI?), and there are even whole reality shows (think Hoarders) following the habits of people with the condition and their struggle with cleaning up that mess their house turned into.

German know-it-all attitude after the floods helps no one

July 2021. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. But accusing politicians and disaster management officials of “system failure” underestimates the forces of nature, DW’s Fabian Schmidt writes.

It’s all too human to look for someone to blame after a huge natural disaster, but that doesn’t help anyone — certainly not the victims, the survivors or the people whose livelihoods were washed away by the masses of water within minutes.

This know-it-all attitude gets on my nerves: Just like Germany has 80 million football coaches after the national team loses a game, now everyone seems to be a disaster relief expert. And not just in Germany.

Information in the project – Holschuld or Bringschuld?

Holschuld from holen, to get and Schuld, obligation. You are obligated to get or ask for the information. Bringschuld from bringen, to bring, provide, give and Schuld, obligation. You are obligated to bring, provide, give the information.

“I didn’t know that!” – “But that’s on the intranet. You should have known that! After all, information is a debt to be collected!”

This or something similar is a dialogue that is heard again and again between project employees and project managers. Whereby instead of “Intranet” there can also be “Project drive”, “SharePoint” or another medium.

Is that really true? Is information in the project really the responsibility of the project staff?

I think the project manager (or the project office) makes things too easy here. I can’t throw all the information out at the employees’ door and then expect them to pick out the ones that are relevant to them. So that we understand each other correctly: the project manager can expect his employees to read meeting minutes or other periodicals regularly if they know where to find the latest issue.

But they won’t, and shouldn’t, bother to sift out “out of line” information that affects them from the jumble of information. That’s not their job. You should work on the project, any other approach would slow down the project.

Holschuld. Bringschuld. German law.

Holschuld: get obligation. Bringschuld: deliver obligation.

What is the difference between a debt to collect, a debt to bring and a debt to send?
In the case of a debt to be collected, the place of performance is with the debtor – the owed item must be picked up there by the creditor.

In the case of an obligation to deliver, the place of performance or fulfillment is with the creditor. The debtor must therefore pay at the domicile of the creditor. If there is a debt to be sent, the debtor must also send it.

The distinction is particularly important when it comes to the question of transport or shipment costs and the question of the transfer of the risk of the loss of the goods (e.g. if a package is lost in the post).

Event organizers despair of the German small state

The jungle of corona measures meant that tours had to be canceled. Here federalism shows its deterrent face.

There was great hope that everything would change with the vaccinations against the corona virus, that cultural life could start again, that normality would return and that everyday corona life would become a case for the history books. But Germany is still a long way from that.

The theaters are playing again, the local cultural actors can also be seen again and get their performances, but the nationwide event business is not really getting off the ground. Just recently, Die Ärzte, Peter Maffay and Nena canceled their planned tours almost simultaneously: One of the reasons for this was the different corona rules in the federal states.

Against the German pettiness in data protection!

High time to start the argument for changes – the topic must not remain taboo.

Criticism of the US would be more credible if we, at least in Europe, had the same understanding of privacy and data protection. But that is by no means the case, as not only surveys show.

If all EU members had converted the 1995 data protection directive into national law in the same way and if all national supervisory authorities had interpreted the regulations in the same way, then most American “data octopuses” would hardly have settled in Ireland. 28 member states of the European Union, that also meant: 28 different views of data protection! So there was no question of Europe speaking with one voice to the US.

Defeating the Secret Scary Syndrome of Information Hoarding

At the end of your day, do you close out dozens of browser tabs that you intended to look at but never got to?

Do you have piles of downloaded movies, TV shows, and music that you’ve never watched?

Have you ever discovered unread PDFs, e-books, and blog articles collecting virtual dust in secret corners of your computer?

Congratulations, you might be an Information Hoarder!

That means you collect information but don’t use it. Like the cat ladies on an episode of “Hoarders,” Information Hoarders have way more stuff than they know what to do with.

This very modern problem stems from the wealth of knowledge at our fingertips, our desire to consume it all, and our inability to do it.

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