Identity, privacy & presence

They are driven to do this by the increasing privacy threats of modern communication: tracking and tracing, data retention, uncontrollable 'lawful intercept' and data harvesting. The end-to-end principle of the internet and its international character allows for technological measures that can restore some of the privacy and sovereignty of the more vulnerable nation states that has been taken away by interception of communication, tracking, tracing, logging and data warehousing. The data concerning everything and everyone is now not only available to government institutions, but is being more and more collected and (mis)used by commercial entities. All kind of data --location data of mobile operators, videocameras on highways, in streets and shops, credit card and payment chip data, easy location tracability due to RFID chips in your clothes, emails and browsing behaviour-- are being collected both by the government and by private organisations and are coupled to each other to produce a complete track of a person. In 2006 the unanimous approval of this XML-based universal Office-format within the International Standards Organisation ISO meant a clear slope change point for innovation and market reach of open standards and open source in general. These negative consequences move far beyond the economic realm and range from an increased digital divide and innovation poverty to large-scale cyber criminality and botnets such as Storm that are able to almost push countries off the internet.