Manfred Kanther (Federal ministry of Interior, Germany) spoke at the opening of the 5. INformation Technology Security Congress in Bonn about
"On the secure way into information society"

Abstract

• Information technology is a central part of efforts in German politics, economity and society.
• There are a lot of international fears about risks of such a information society.
• Modern communication is misused by criminals. They exploid insecure data transaction and hide themself in the anonymity of the networks. Electronic tracing is very hard, the place of criminal action is not definit, so the police has to master new difficulties.
• In order to reduce the advances of the criminals, the roots of those advances should be removed before they can come into effect. So it would be not necessary to cry for new laws.
• There are examples of such technical preventions. The BSI [visible part of an organisation like the NSA, but much smaller ;-) -LD] has to develop such technical solutions to stop criminals in the networks. There will be a market.
• Cryptography is the key technology to gain security and trust.
• Cryptography is necessary to connect companies and the gouverment into the networks.
• Cryptography can not be allowed to stop legal wiretrapping or render police efforts useless. It can not be acceptable, that intelligence laws are senseless.
• It is possible to merge security and controlling interests: Key Escrow or GAK (Gouvermental Accessed Keys). This aims not to allow new observation possibilities, but to keep existing ones.
• The police urges, that only licenced algorithms are in use. We have to provide the police perfect investigation enviroments.
• Steganographie is useless, because it's too hard to use. A lot of people overestimate the possibilities of steganography. Steganography is unable to manage ordinary phone calls. If steganography is used nevertheless, the investigator can obtain informations from the use itself. It is a major goal of the current administration to ease to work of the police.
• The Internet is not only the home of the devil, but we will fight the devil.
• But it's not our goal to cut the freedom rights of the users to speak and operate.
• It's fine, that the bussiness is going to selfregulate [censor itself? -LD] the content in the network. This prevents law reagulation of this subject.
• Cooperation of the ISPs is the base to technically filter the net from illegal and harmful contents. On this base providerindependent classification of content can be prepared by us.
• We have to train our personal to fight computer base crime better.
• The law backround is currently prepared by the discussion of the IDuK law containing the Digital Signature law.
• This law was prepared in a large cooperation of experts of economity and science. It's supported by the bussiness.
• The adminstration is going to work together only with the bussiness in this subject.
• The BSI is the melting pot of those developments.
• It's word causes acceptance in gouvermental applications, bussiness solutions and public thinking.
• The BSI works together with the German Federal Bank and banking organisations to prepeare and certify new paying mechanisms.
• The publications of the BSI are widly accepted as secuirty standards.
• I'm pround of the BSI, it will master the furture problems.