The German government a while ago answered questions about expenditures by the federal ministry of home affairs for private service providers b hardly noticed by the English speaking world. The parlamentary enquiry (b Minor interpellationb) no. 17/10077 by Jan Korte, MP of The Left party, has now been translated into English. The answers were far more detailed than one would expect. Therebs 43 pages (this includes questions), 20 of which are tables that list who was contracted, how much money was paid, what for and how each paid item was used. The German ministry for home affairs and thus the German police clearly state that they are monitoring Skype, Google Mail, MSN Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Facebook chat if deemed necessary. Money is spent on trojan viruses and we can be quite certain which company produces the IMSI catchers used by German police. We know how much money was spent by the Federal Police on border control biometrics, on passenger information systems and telecommunications surveillance. Digitask, a company whose reputation was clearly damaged after its trojan virus was found and analysed by the Chaos Computer Club in 2011, seems to still be a regular contractor of German authorities. Altogether more than a billion Euro was spent on private services by German police and other public authorities in the realm of the ministry of home affairs in the years 2002 b 2012. A slightly longer version of this plus the pdf can be found here: http://annalist.noblogs.org/post/2012/10/03/german-police-monitors-skype-goo... Best, Anne -- http://about.me/annalist http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=vindex&search=0x7689407F942951E2 -- Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE