Rickrolling Schäuble
====================

Thursday 4 February 2010 00:07

How hard is it to just not try to buy some stolen
data, do not collect maybe about a couple of
hundred million euros, and show the world you're
serious about not being nazis and communists
anymore? First of all I'm surprised there even is a
discussion about this, when it's clearly a
holocaust of wrong.

What it boils down to is that some people in the
German government think they can get away with
everything the constitution doesn't let them do as
long as they can pay criminals to do it for them,
and they don't mind if those criminals operate
outside of Germany, breaking laws in countries
Germany pretends to respect as sovereign states.
The whole neo-conservative crap Guantanamo Bay and
other loopholes are based on to just make things
legally complicated enough for not to bright
politicians to enter the level of "If you believe
it yourself it's not really lying". Given the
possibilities of this approach I won't be surprised
if there would be a perfectly legal way to get the
same result as some genocide, but without something
that is really legally technically genocide. So
there's nothing wrong with that then?

Because there also seems to be no discussion about
whether it's a good idea or not. There's a lot of
legal people discussing it as if when it turns out
to be legal to do it that automatically means it's
the right thing to do. So even if the highest court
would say it's completely legal to go on with it,
what's the problem? The problem is that to obtain
the stolen data you'll have to deal with the
criminal who stole the data. If it was a German spy
who's just on the payroll of the German secret
service and probably swore some oath and plays by
the rules it would be a different story, but how
can we be so sure what we'll get will be as
valuable as we want to believe? The seller is a
criminal who's just in it for the money and if
Germany is serious about fighting crime how exactly
does this deal go down with the seller not running
the risk of getting caught and we're not running
the risk of buying a copy of "Never gonna give you
up" for two and a half million euros?

Whatever data is obtained this way is tainted data.
All these people claiming that not buying the data
would let anyone rich enough to be able to afford a
Swiss bank account get away with their crimes don't
seem to realize that the really rich maybe have
already paid the seller to have their data removed
from the list. What are we going to do about that?
And things get even more interesting if the seller
likes to filter the data in a way the German
government would never be allowed to do. If it
turned out there were only Jewish names on the
list, would the German government still be happy to
vigorously prosecute them, or would they then
realize they are then just the tool of some
criminal who set them up with tainted data, which
was all perfectly legal? And wouldn't that make it
perfectly legal for Germany to only go after the
Jews?

Apparently for a couple of hundred million euros
they would. It's amazing how the amount of money
involved combined with how much they think they
need it plays a huge role in the discussion.
Germany seems to no longer be able to afford to
live within the laws of it's own constitution. They
screwed up again, they need resources to keep their
citizens happy, so they invade a neighboring
country. And it's all presented as if this will at
once solve the whole financial crisis Germany is
currently in. But we're only talking about an
amount of money the size of a single
Elbphilharmonie. It makes no sense to sell out the
constitution for peanuts like that.

And we're only talking about taxes, not war
criminals or child raping priests. Unless you're
aiming for everyone to be equally poor you'd better
pay attention to where the tax is still coming
from. If someone paid one million in taxes, but was
supposed to pay 1.1 million, can you afford to get
that last 0.1 million and then next time miss out
on the 1.1 million altogether because that tax
payer then moved to a more friendly country? It's
not like every German with a Swiss bank account
doesn't pay any taxes at all, so the end result of
trying to get more money could actually be having
less money. Unless you shoot the rich while they
try to leave the country.

Those who want to make a deal with a criminal also
don't seem to realize this behavior triggers a
whole system of crime. Without Germany creating a
market for stolen data the value of Swiss bank data
isn't that high. But by offering millions for it to
criminals suddenly any IT-guy who might have access
to this data has to fear for his children being
kidnapped and being asked for the data as ransom.
So how many kidnapped Swiss children is Germany
willing to accept to get to a few billion euros?

Or can Germany just claim to be stupid enough to
not realize what was going on again? The scary
thing is that a lot of people involved really seem
to be that stupid…

by Roland van Ipenburg
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ipenburg/blog/posts/dull/2010/02/04/rickrolling-schaeuble/