New German Government Coalition Promises Not To Buy Exploits

The three political parties set to form the new German government have agreed to stop buying zero-day vulnerabilities and limit the government's future use of monitoring software (spyware). From a report: The Green Party, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), and the Free Democratic Party (FDP) entered into a government coalition last month, and their new joint government cabinet is expected to be formally elected to power later today following a vote in the German Parliament. Their political collaboration was announced last month, on November 24, and the announcement was also accompanied by a 178-page document outlining the coalition's joint core governing principles on a number of social, political, and economic topics. Among them were different IT, privacy, and cybersecurity-related issues, including two paragraphs that addressed the German's state penchant for acquiring zero-day vulnerabilities and using them in surveillance operations. "The exploitation of weak points in IT systems is in a highly problematic relationship to IT security and civil rights," the three parties said in the section dedicated to national and internal security.