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Open Source is a hot topic in Denmark
2000-01-29 Monday January 17th the Danish Ministry of Research held a hearing about which strong encryption tools and/or protocols the Danish government should use for communication with the citizens.
The minister of research, Birte Weiss, opened the hearing. She mentioned Echelon as one of the reasons for arranging this hearing. "The Danish government can not do anything to protect the Danish citizens from foreign intelligence agencies, and each individual is encouraged to use encryption software" Birte Weiss said.
The hearing ranged from secure e-commerce solutions to encryption of e-mail. Several software products were presented by Hewlett Packard, Utimaco, Network Associates, iD2 Technologies, IBM Denmark, Cryptomatic, Microsoft Research, Baltimore Technologies. The Free Software Community was represented by Werner Koch, author and project leader on the GnuPG (GNU privacy guard) project.
At the first announcement of the hearing, December 17th 1999, no Open Source software was represented. This caused a mail storm on SSLUG's mailing-lists and Werner Koch was invited by SSLUG to represent GnuPG.. The Danish Ministry of Research was asked to have Werner Koch on the panel and to cover the travel expenses.
While some of the companies simply did a commercial presentation, it is worth noticing that Stefek Zaba from Hewlett Packard (HP) also presented FreeSWAN, GnuPG and OpenSSL as valuable products they offer to their customers. HP offers a lot of security solutions to their customers and use Open Source software whenever they believe this is the best solution for the customer.
After the vendor presentations, representatives from the IT Security Council questioned the vendors.
SSLUG was strongly represented with approximately 15 of the 250 attendees at the hearing. When the audience had the possibility to pose questions to the panel, SSLUG members raised roughly half of the questions, such as "What will happen if your company goes bankrupt?" - the long-term goal with hearing is to choose a solution for all encrypted digital communication in Denmark, so this was not a question to neglect. Only IBM and Microsoft dared to answer. IBM responded "We have a lot of partners so it isn't a problem."
Even more interesting was the "how do you prevent back-doors in you product?". Most companies stated that third-party reviewers could be allowed to check the source code given that they conform to a NDA (non disclosure agreement). The representatives for GnuPG and PGP had an easy task here. Roger Needham from Microsoft managed to make the whole audience laugh by stating that "If our product contains a back-door, we simply don't know anything about it...."
After the presentation of all the products there was a panel discussion with the IT Security Council and the audience.
The following Thursday Jan Carlsen from the IT Security Council was in the Danish radio. Here he stated that "it would probably be a Microsoft solution" which the council would suggest to the Danish government. This was clearly not the picture we got from attending the hearing.
The current task of the IT Security Council is now to make a proposal to the Danish government which will be released in the first week of March 2000.
Regarding Open Source software, the Danish left-wing party 'Socialistisk Folkeparti' had a press release on Sunday January 16th where they proposed, as it has been in France too, that the government should use Open Source Software.
A summary of that week was that Open Source software was mentioned several times in the Danish media. Newspapers, IT magazines and radio. Loosely counted it was more than 15 exposes within a week which is quite well in a country with only 5 million citizens.
But it is not only the left wing in the Danish parliament who has heard of Open Source. Back in October 1999 the right-wing party 'Frihed 2000' brought up the problems that software patents will give Open Source developers, if they are introduced in Denmark.
SSLUG - Skåne Sjælland Linux User Group is a Swedish/Danish LUG with more than 4700 members, and a lot of activities through mailing lists, meetings, and conferences.
Further reading
Written presentations for the hearing http://www.sslug.dk/misc/kryptering-20000117 'Socialistisk Folkeparti' "demands open source" http://lwn.net/2000/0120/commerce.phtml Skåne Sjælland Linux User Group http://www.sslug.dk/ Contact
- CIO Hans Schou <chlor.dk>
- CPO Peter Toft <pto@sslug.dk>
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Denne side vedligeholdes af Hans Schou (<chlor.dk>)