Foreword by DIVSI patron, Joachim Gauck

Joachim Gauck
Patron of Deutsches Institut für Vertrauen und Sicherheit im Internet (DIVSI).Joachim Gauck served as a member of the Eastern German People’s Chamber for the political movement Neues Forum. The People’s Chamber was freely elected following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Later on he served as the special representative for documents that East Germany’s Ministry of State Security maintained on individuals, special representative of the German government for these documents and then federal commissioner for them.
He is the German member of the Management Board of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia and chairman of the association “Gegen Vergessen – Für Demokratie” (Against Neglect – For Democracy).

When Jürgen Gerdes, member of the Deutsche Post Board of Management (MAIL), asked me to become patron of the newly established non-profit organization “Deutsches Institut für Vertrauen und Sicherheit im Internet” (DIVSI), I hesitated for a moment. The first thought that came to my mind was that online security really is a job for knowledgeable IT specialists to handle. Admittedly, I do know how to use today’s means of electronic communication. But I would never be mistaken for an IT expert.

The deeper I ventured into the topic, the faster I realized one thing: Online security and data protection are not simply a matter of technology. The supposedly boundless world of the Internet forces us to grapple with questions that no app can answer for us. At the very latest, the outer limits of cyberspace rise up before us when we have to decide just how much risk, how much responsibility and how much freedom of online activity we are willing to concede to ourselves. It is a decision that, ultimately, is left up to each user to settle.

Language is the starting point of freedom, a fact that moves this question beyond the realm of software programmers. For a long time now, the Internet has been something more than a concern of technicians. It has evolved into a cultural achievement, one that shapes people’s everyday lives. Words that were once the sole possession of specialists have worked their way into the layman’s vocabulary. As a result, the term “data protection” implies a level of security that hardly exists at all. And data protectors cannot protect data. At best, they can control whether data is adequately protected. We see how important it is to pay close attention to the precision of words when we are talking about freedom and self-determination in the world of the Internet, where we now spend more and more time of our lives.

The global Internet has everything it takes to undermine the rights of all citizens contained in the first ten articles of the German Constitution. This is particularly the case for the freedoms of speech and the press contained in Article Five – a basic right of our living democracy – and, in the end, it is also the case for the core sentence in our Constitution, Article One: Human dignity shall be inviolable.

To correctly assess such threats to our freedom in the future and to be able to promote trust in the medium, we must devote more sensibility, more attention and more research to the Internet and its users. This is a responsibility that an institution like the Deutsche Institut für Vertrauen und Sicherheit im Internet can assume – and it is the reason I support its work.