Back from Datenspuren 2006

Martin Dittus · 2006-05-15 · a new world, conferences, data mining, privacy · write a comment

Yesterday night I returned from Datenspuren 2006 in Dresden, a conference on privacy and technology organized by the local CCC. This was both the first time I was in Dresden, and also the first time I attended the Datenspuren conference, so I was curious to see both. Short version: I'll probably come back next time.

What follows are random excerpts from my conference notes.

update 2006-05-17 -- From the Chaosradio "Chaos TV" feed: "Bericht von den Datenspuren 2006", with an MP3 download of a radio special produced during the conference. 15 minutes of interviews with organizers, participants and guests (including yours truly), in German.

update 2006-06-08 -- The audio recordings of the sessions are now online. And I find it curious that neither the Flickr+del.icio.us tag searches nor the Google blog search turn up many results for this conference.

Dresden and Neustadt: Very Nice

Neustadt, the district of Dresden where the conference took place, surprised me a lot -- it has a very interesting atmosphere. A little like Kreuzberg and Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin, but with the color and concentration of the Schanzenviertel in Hamburg, and cleaner. Streetart galore.

There are a lot of bars, cafés and pubs; a record store in every street, and at night it has a disctinct holiday atmosphere with all the drunk 20something students (and punks) running around in the streets, moving from one party to the next, and hanging out.

The center of Dresden radiates an impression of wealth -- for me it was the first east German city that didn't look like one. In comparison, most parts of east Berlin still look distinctly east German.

Random window in the Louisenstraße, Dresden-Neustadt. Photo by Hagbard.

"Data Management"

Complex data visualization is becoming a selling point for data mining software targeted at communications surveillance businesses and agencies. Frank Rieger's prediction: we'll see them in court as evidence and/or documentation. Look at the i2 homepage for screenshots, especially of their Analyst's Notebook software. Examples: "insurance fraud timeline", "organized crime hierarchy chart", "intelligence analysis chart". (Didn't find my favorite from Frank's presentation though, a photo of a complex organization chart being shown at court.)

Surveillance of Internet communication can already correlate data from distributed sources, which means network traffic on many modern anonymizer services (Tor etc) is not as hard to watch as you might wish.

The company EDS, originally founded by Ross Perot, apparently was the originator of the outsourcing of business processes; they offer data management and business process outsourcing to not only major German corporations, but also German government agencies. As an American company they are however not bound by German law. (I have no knowledge about the exact implications, but it's an interesting anecdote.)

George W. Bush (with glasses!) looking at an organization chart of Osama bin Laden's financial network. Image from i2inc.com (let's see how long they let me keep it here).

Life on a Chip

As a result of the German mandatory "Gesundheitskarte" we will be able to automate certain medical processes; notably pharmacists might gradually become replaced by machines. Think medicine vending machines that read prescriptions from your chip card.

The Gesundheitskarte imo will also be the first system in Germany that forces every citizen to know and use a PIN. There still are citizens who do not use any of the current PIN-based systems (bank services, mobile phones etc). (In fact, the Gesundheitskarte will even require you to know two different PINs.)

From 2007 on, German cigarette vending machines will require age verification via EC cards (or the German "Geldkarte"). The alleged rationale is the protection of minors (Jugendschutz). Interesting consequence, if I understand the system correctly: you'll need a German bank account to buy cigarettes from a vending machine. (For details see geldkarte-jugendschutz.de, in German.)

Also from 2007 on German ID cards (Personalausweise) will carry biometric data on a chip, similar to our new travel passports introduced in 2005 that contain an RFID chip. Will have to look into this further, and possibly get a new ID before that. (Damn, I need to start paying attention to German media more often; this is not the first time I hear such big news a long time after they're first announced.)

Constanze Kurz's session, funny and entertaining. Photo by martinroell.

etc

Of course there was much talk about and updates on the world going down the drain. I think it was Frank who introduced a beautiful term with his statement that we are confronted with "non-linear climate" (nonlineares Klima). Frank and Rop Gonggrijp also predict the mass emigration to those few countries that manage to remain stable despite all aspects of society gradually failing in the rest of the world, and they say it will be interesting to watch these countries cope with the consequences (think more restrictive immigration laws).

According to Jörg Tauss, the attorney general (Justizminister) of Estonia is 27.

Lutz Donnerhacke tells us that DNSSEC is not only a security extension to the domain name system, but that it is also a good means for the secure distribution of public keys without the need for a CA -- useful for SSH, SSL and any other technology based on PKs.

Then I had a chat with Jens Ohlig about Jabber servers; he recommends jabberd 1.4 if I'm looking for a simple setup, but I'm still more interested in the new generation of even more lightweight servers based on scripting languages (xmppd, djabberd). Of course his company tries to solve a different class of problems.

eof

Stefan Köpsell is an excellent speaker. He is young but very relaxed in front of an audience, uses good and clear language and well-structured arguments, and has very good replies to questions from the audience, even if they challenge his research approach. Oh, and his research is interesting too ;)

Jörg Tauss, one of the initiators of our "Informationsfreiheitsgesetz" (the German equivalent to America's Freedom of Information Act), finally got a laptop and has learned how to use PowerPoint. He did his 22c3 presentation on an overhead projector, a technology so ancient that most of our American readers probably won't even remember what that is. He's not fully there yet though: He signs his slides with a ©opyrighted byline.

And man, after a few sunny weeks in Berlin it's fucking cold again.

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