Central weapons register. Gun owners in Germany currently have to register their guns at several hundred (~550) small separate offices that don’t coordinate with one another. Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich (CSU) says the government has scheduled the creation of a central gun registry in Germany, which police will be able to use to check weapon ownership starting in early 2013. The central registry is being created in response to an EU guideline that would have allowed two more years for implementation.
Update on 15 Nov 2013: Research by Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Norddeutsche Rundfunk has discovered that development of the Waffenregister (and development of a central registry of personal I.D.’s, Personalausweisregister), were two of ~100 jobs the German government outsourced in the past five years to a German subsidiary of Computer Sciences Corporation (C.S.C.), a U.S. company very firmly entwined with the U.S. intelligence sector whose software probably can’t be trusted. C.S.C. helped develop surveillance software for the N.S.A. and was, Süddeutsche.de reported, involved via another subsidiary in the C.I.A.’s Verschleppung of the German citizen Khaled el-Masri in 2004.
Süddeutsche.de said C.S.C. helped test the Bundestrojaner malware of the Bundeskriminalamt and support the introduction of electronic files into the German courts. It helped with the introduction of a nationwide “electronic passport” and Germany’s recent “secure email” project known as De-Mail.
“The company is part of the American shadow army of private companies that work cheaply/favorably [günstig] and invisibly for the military and secret services. The company belonged to a consortium, for example, that was awarded the N.S.A.’s so-called Trailblazer Project, which was said to include development of the recently disclosed Prism program. Some of these problematic involvements have been known for years, yet supposedly not within the Ministry of the Interior, which signed the framework contracts with C.S.C.”
Interior Ministry spokespeople said the ministry had no “own knowledge” of these entanglements but that the framework contracts “usually” included clauses forbidding transmission of confidential data to third parties.
(Tsen TRALL ess VOFF en reh GIST er.)