Germany outlaws computer security

Well, the headline may be a bit provocative, I admit.

The German "Bundestag" has passed a new law to outlaw "hacker tools" against critics from experts. Needless to say, that many software programs can be used in a creative way to "hack" another computer system. Think of using a Webbrowser (Internet Explorer or Firefox) to place an XSS (cross site scripting) attack on a vulnerable system. Is the browser now considered a hacking tool? This new law is extremely questionable also, because security experts use exactly the same tools to secure their networks as a hacker would use for attacking a target (or at least preparing an attack).

I wonder what this means to all those Open Source Operating Systems shipping security tools like nmap, etherreal, netcat and the such. Hence, even ping could be considered a hacking tool! To stretch this a little bit further, every owner of a compiler could build his own "hacking tools".

Outlaw guns and only outlaws will own guns.

This new law was covered by the CCC (Chaos Computer Club), here is an english translation.