14 DAY TRIAL // Back in July, the German government released a report detailing the amounts of money spent by the Federal Ministry of the Interior on private service providers. The inquiry, made by Jan Korte of the Left Party, has revealed some interesting things.
Although not all the questions asked by Korte were answered because they would have exposed classified information, the report showed that the German Ministry of Home Affairs and, implicitly, the police were monitoring communications such as Skype, Gmail, MSN Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and even Facebook.
Furthermore, according to blogger Anna Roth, it appears that Germany has spent quite a lot on Trojans and IMSI catchers.
Back in 2011, the Chaos Computer Club uncovered a Trojan, dubbed R2D2, that had been used by the German police in criminal investigations.
As it turns out, despite the massive scandal that broke out at the time, the company that developed the software is still collaborating with the government.
Although very interesting, the report didn't attract a lot of attention until a few days ago when it was translated into English.