Yes, as titles goes it is a snazzy one, yet there it is. It all started for me about 6 hours ago and I took notice of the news. The initial issue I had with it is usually seen in dictionaries. When you seek Grundlichkeit you get:
Gründlichkeit noun
thoroughness [noun] care; attention to detail; also see German intelligence services.
So knowing what was in stock I decided to take another look, especially in light that the news is now also all over LinkedIn.
There are two sides. In the first there is that I have no idea whether she is right or wrong, I DID NOT SEE THE EVIDENCE. That needs to be clear from the very first setting. However, as I was looking into an article from August 2021 giving us “When activist Lilith Wittmann drew attention to a security problem with a CDU app, the party pressed criminal charges against her” (source: Berliner Zeitung). There we also see “The Landeskriminalamt – a branch of the police focused on serious crime – is investigating the IT security researcher – as she calls herself. The CDU lodged a criminal complaint against Wittmann after she told the party about a security vulnerability in the CDU-Connect election campaign app. The activist has thus became the target of a paragraph in Germany’s criminal code for which the CDU is chiefly responsible.” And there as a 25 year old, we see that she worked in this field for 10 years, so she started in this field when she was 15. When the BZ adds “Paragraph 202c makes the interception of data a punishable offence. The law is considered controversial because, depending on how it is interpreted, it also covers people who investigate security vulnerabilities in order to report them, not to exploit them. Thanks to §202, Wittmann could now stand trial” Yet that is not enough, the article (at https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/en/the-cdus-leaky-campaign-app-li.176310) also gives us “Due to a security gap in the app software, data on around 500,000 people who had been visited by CDU door-to-door campaigners had been stored on servers without any major security barriers and was therefore basically open to public scrutiny. She could also access the data of about 18,000 users registered with the app – i.e. election workers – as well as 1,300 records of people who had indicated that they wanted to support the election campaign.” The numbers and facts are not that important. It is “Wittmann had been alerted to the potential security vulnerability on Twitter back in May.” It matters that she never discovered it, it does not mean that the issue did not exist, it implies that she is someone’s tool. She becomes the alibi no ones to be. So when I see ‘Apple AirTags Used by German Researcher Uncover Secret Intelligence Agency’ (at https://www.techtimes.com/articles/270997/20220125/apple-airtags-used-german-researcher-uncover-secret-intelligence-agency.htm) I wonder what actually is going on. You see, the Tech Times article gives us “a German researcher has used one to expose the secrets of the government, according to Apple Insider”, this leads us to “Lilith Wittmann, a German activist, claims that she has uncovered how Germany’s Federal Telecommunications Service is just a front for a secret intelligence agency”, is it though? Do not get me wrong, I believe that the Dutch AIVD uses KPN Telecom, GCHQ uses British telecom and so on and that puts the NSA in a bit of a mess (especially if they rely on Sprint Telecom), with a big laughing out loud at the end of that. Yet to see these companies (including the German Federal Telecommunications Service) as an intelligence front is a bit of a stretch. What I see (due to the Berliner Zeitung) is a wannabe with a chip on her shoulder, She is seemingly used as a tool, but to what end is not clear, and it will not be clear until someone digs into the data she was led to. Yes, I am distinct here, Twitter led her to one part, but I reckon that she is someones tool.
German intelligence (thanks in part to East German Stasi) is unearthly painted with the colour of grundlichkeit, so the story does not fit and 4 years after the Apple Watches leading to a black site makes the Apple gadget a clear no go. And when we see “Some of the steps that she details can no longer be reproduced, like looking up a list of federal authorities online. Similarly, the researcher includes transcripts of phone calls with an official whose phone number that she reports then has stopped working.” We see evidence that is not verifiable and the sinister theorists of a dark nature will rely on “You see! That is evidence” It is not, it really is not. There are other paths to verification and I see none of them, someone is leading us through some rabbit hole telling us to ignore the sideways there but that is a shallow setting to anything that makes sense. I personally see nothing more than an article to set a system up for clicking and receiving digital dollars (an applied click bitch principle).
And in the middle of it, a self proclaimed activist who worked in cyber security since she was 15, she should know better and she should have been able to present more evidence if there was any. You see German grundlichkeit is one thing, systems with log files are another, the most basic setting in any system and it is not seen here. It is not reported here. Why is that? You see, as I personally see it grundlichkeit also implies records (to show grundlichkeit), records can be tracked, they rely on log files (in many cases) and in many cases it leads to something, not that it is valid, but it could imply that and now we see a cyber operator (to coin a phrase) who uses an Apple AirTag and she does not have a log file to present that shows us something? Weird is it not?
I think she is being used, for what, by whom and to what end remains unknown, but perhaps German intelligence might make something of it, and me? I am hungry and I have deserved an ice cream. I would go for Weißwürste with Haxen and a large Munich pint with Kaiserschmarrn yet I am in Australia, so an ice cream will have to do.
Unfolding the ravings of a conspiracy theorist makes me hungry, I never knew why.
Enjoy!
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 