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星期六， 2008年6月7日

由 克里斯托弗Caldwell | 设定照相机和监测雇员’洗手间断裂，作为超市连锁Lidl; 保留一笔“黑金钱”资金为佣金对官员在发展中国家， 西门子 涉嫌; 牵制金钱支付应召女郎为加工困难的委员会委员， 大众 …德国董事晚了不在他们最佳。 但什么都没有，因此冲击了公众作为指控在过去二个星期那 Deutsche Telekom最大的电话小组在欧洲，在新闻工作者和委员会委员使用一名私家侦探暗中侦察。

德国有，一般来说，一个令人敬佩的系统为保护的保密性。 它粉碎没有，因为它的精华犯了几个错误，但由于企业在所有国家面对的新的经济和社会压力。

什么Telekom零零星星地涌现。 在2005年1月-，当Kai-Uwe Ricke，它的首席执行官，尝试在右边公司的财务通过削减45,000工作-德国商业期刊资本发表了文章根据上层Telekom文件。 主席监督理事会， Klaus Zumwinkel先生Ricke和，相信泄漏来自委员会。 他们决定塞住它。 告诉Network的公司德国雇用了。 它宣称监测成千上万的电话发现痣。 它也许追踪了个体’哪里与移动电话数据和甚而监视的Blackstone，美国投资小组， 2006年在公司中买一个铁砧。

今年初， Ralf Kühn，网络德国头，电传了一张发货票共计数十万欧元为被提供的服务。 因为Der Spiegel的帐户投入了它，他提供了“我们的营业关系的一个受控终止被保护免受不慎重”。 当前Telekom院长， René Obermann，从Ricke先生在2006年11月接管，与检察官联系。 ricke先生， Zumwinkel先生和六其他现在是在调查之中。 (Obermann先生不是。) Telekom的前安全负责人说首席执行官和主席不是用于的消息灵通的手段调查泄漏。

美国计算机巨头 惠普 有一则相似的丑闻2006年介入的泄漏从委员会和私家侦探雇用揭露他们。 为什么这一个触击了神经？ For one thing, German politics has lately been focused on data security. This year Germany came into compliance with European Union directives calling for phone records to be stored for at least six months. Wolfgang Schäuble, the interior minister, has asked for broader powers to monitor telecommunications, the better to fight terrorism.

Corporate leaders have very good reasons to treat boardroom leaks as emergencies. Responsibilities to shareholders can be compromised by the loss of business plans and trade secrets. There are moral responsibilities, too. Leaks can be a sign of insider trading. If they are not curbed, the likelihood that they will lead to some kind of market manipulation will grow. Against that, what is it to take a peek at a few phone calls? If you raise freedom of the press, a hard-headed executive can reply – in good conscience – that he is not against it; he is interested only in rooting underhanded conduct out of his boardroom.

But here a line may have been crossed – because it is alleged that Telekom monitored not just its employees but its customers, private citizens. It may have done so with the help of data the company collected on them in the course of ordinary business. If that is the case, then this was less a matter of fiduciary responsibility or “quality control” than a privatised espionage operation.

After these revelations, Financial Times Deutschland reported that in 2000 its own reporter, Tasso Enzweiler, had been tailed, filmed and investigated by Control Risks, a company hired by Telekom. At one point, according to a report filed by Control Risks and cited by FTD, two teams run by a second company called Desa were tailing Mr Enzweiler around the clock, tactics reminiscent of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi. Desa, as it happens, was founded by former Stasi agents.

That is what is unsettling. When we talk about the “power” of corporations we usually mean they have money and influence. But the allegations against Telekom describe a company exercising the kind of power we associate with states. Of course, Telekom, in which the German government still owns a 32 per cent stake, is a hybrid company.

But Telekom’s state-like power comes from its operation in telecommunications, its trade in data. The power that data offer is of a peculiar kind. Why has Facebook’s market been estimated at $15bn? Not because of any “product” Facebook “sells” to its members. The value comes from the window it offers on the consumer preferences of its millions of members. Personal data are to the new economy what oil reserves are to the old one – the core commodity. Is it realistic to expect a company that controls a lot of data to feign ignorance of their political uses forever?

Mr Schäuble would like to establish some code of self-regulation for telecom companies. Renate Künast, a prominent Green parliamentarian, does not think that is possible. She told the Frankfurter Rundschau that the only real way of protecting data is to keep as little as possible. Ms Künast’s approach would do economic harm, because it would destroy a valuable commodity. But she has a point. Maybe personal data are a man-made equivalent of what economists call the “resource curse”. Just as there is a correlation between oil wealth and autocracy, there appears to be some link – hard to define but getting easier – between the growth of our information wealth and a dwindling of our liberties.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

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This entry was posted on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 at 1:04 am and is filed under Surveillance, Civil Liberties & Human Rights News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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