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Their brains certainly weren’t. A new anti-hacker law in Germany has passed and is actually of concern since it refers to the extremely vague term “hacker tool”. Sadly, many laws are left vague, most likely on purpose to allow law enforcement to apply it as they need to without requesting new laws all the time. The problem there is that the successful defence from these ambiguous laws depend entirely on the amount you can spend on a lawyer and what judge happens to be in front of you that day.

As mentioned on Make, Nmap can very easily be considered a hacker tool. Most sys-admins use it regularly though. That’s just a small example, if you’ve ever done any system administration, think of how many tools you have used in the last week that could be considered “hacker tools”.

Better still, how can you defend yourself against hackers without possessing hacker tools? If you can’t study what the enemy is using against you, how can mount reasonable defenses. Take the captcha issue that PPP is trying to use to deal with their bot problem. If PPP wasn’t legally able to use the very same tools that people are using against them to test their solutions, what do you think their chances of even temporary success would be? I personally don’t know. How good are you at hitting the bull’s eye on a dartboard in a dark room when you don’t even know which wall the dartboard’s on? That seems like an equally challenging problem to solve.

I understand why they passed this law, I can understand the fundamental concerns and fears that pushed this law through, but a law should be reasonably precise. Especially when you get into grey areas. Sure the term causing physical harm may be ambiguous, but whether it’s minor or major, most people would agree that it’s bad. In this case, hacker tools covers such a wide net that you cross from the black, to the grey, to the white. Is tracert a hacker tool? Hackers use it… therefore… If you’re in Germany and are running Windows, you’re breaking the law.

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