After 2 years, the German hacker-tool law has proved useless

Monday

Two years ago, Germany passed a law that criminalized the making and distribution of security tools. Although it was an attempt to implement a part of the COE Treaty into German law, it completely missed the intended purpose and hurt legitimate security research.

Looking back, noone has been prosecuted under this law and it only scared whitehat hackers or companies to move (their tools) outside of Germany.

Read the following article from theregister.co.uk which has some good details on it.

Abstract: While we can empathize with the desire to keep hacker tools out of the hands of script kiddies who intend harm, and keep black hat hackers from developing and distributing ever more sophisticated hacker tools and zero day attacks, the problem remains that these same tools can be and are used for good purposes by good people. While the statute attempts to focus on bad people with bad intent, it lacks the precision to do so.

(Photo under creative commons from Chris Daniel's photostream)