Germany floats Trojan for terror suspects

German politicians have defended plans to email Trojan horse software to terror suspects in the hopes of monitoring their conversations. The measures have sparked a fierce civil liberties debate. The dubious efficacy of the wheeze is yet to come under serious consideration.

Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble is seeking police powers to harness malware in upcoming federal security laws. AP reports that snoopware would be developed by the German government rather than existing commercial software. Using malware to spy on terror suspects would "cover a serious and scandalous hole in our information that has arisen through technical changes in recent years," according to Stefan Kaller, a spokesman for Schaeuble.

It would, of course, be far more straightforward to bug the PCs of suspects by physically planting keystroke monitors or the like to their machines, rather than chancing matters to email. Proposals to give explicit permission for law enforcement officials to plant such malware stems from a Federal Court ruling earlier this year declaring clandestine searches of suspects' computers to be inadmissible as evidence pending a law regulating the practice. Germany's Federal Court of Justice said that the practice was not covered by existing lawful surveillance legislation.

The Bill is yet to be finalised, but proposals leaked to the German media involve the idea of booby trapping messages ostensible from the German Finance Ministry or the Youth Services Office.

Would-be terrorists need only use Ubuntu Linux to avoid the ploy. And even if they stuck with Windows their anti-virus software might detect the malware. Anti-virus firms that accede to law enforcement demands to turn a blind eye to state-sanctioned malware risk undermining trust in their software, as similar experience in the US has shown.

Once the malware gets into circulation there's no guarantee it won't be turned against innocent users.

The whole concept is loaded with irony. For one thing, German government computers, like those in the UK before them, are currently under targeted Trojan assault. Meanwhile, recently introduced German legislation criminalises possession of hacking tools through vaguely worded measures that also appear to make network security tools illegal, though this is yet to be tested in court.

Altogether the German Trojan proposals are a thoroughly bad idea. ®