from charlotte minute to chancellor also from bismarck. the history of the germans has been shaped by great rulers. i swear always to bring my royal power to fat to protect christendom and suppress divine truth. ali to get nuclear the enemy in time only last year and steered by courageous decisions which told your master we have received the round of the real news from god. we must be forty piece. the germans started may thirteenth on t.w. .

may the twelfth twenty seventeen overnight a dangerous computer virus spread around the globe one a crime was the name cyber criminals gave to the trojan which they used to blackmail their victims and encrypt that computer data the ransom between three hundred and six hundred dollars to be paid into an anonymous bitcoin account more than two hundred thousand computers on all continents were affected by this attack from the german railway to the ministry of the interior in russia and the japanese car manufacturer a honda. in britain some hospitals even had to implement their emergency plan how could a single piece of malware similar taney asli cripple companies hospitals and even intelligence services all over the world the answer involves microsoft all the victims. used the same software they were all vulnerable in the same way and they

all relied on a single company namely microsoft the same applies to every state administration in europe. what's the impact of this dependence journalist khaled schuman and colleagues from investigate europe wanted to find out the results are alarming. the dial emma affects the data belonging to all of us and out of pendants on microsoft goes far deeper than just our use of word or excel software almost every governmental and public office already in the e.u. from city halls to vehicle registration offices and tax offices in software that was specially designed for that work. these many thousands of special programs were designed for the windows operating system and the more complex information

technology becomes the more our public institutions become dependent on the microsoft monopoly. it's a problem that martin charleville the former german director general for information technology knows well. before the german off orators are de facto dependent on microsoft because with very few exceptions microsoft products are used in every government office and. that means it's not easy to use different software . all documents exist in microsoft format. employees are all trained to use microsoft programs the corresponding servers also run with microsoft software so of course there's also results and economic dependence to guide that's what will happen if it's continuous for another ten or twenty years he's already for the only hobby is my personal concern is that the dependency of various manufacturers of the . and the virtualization of our entire i.t. system meaning the relocation of i.t.

systems into the cloud into some distance. the servers that could be anywhere which would mean our government's ability to control and manage its own ninety is constantly diminishing and in that sense our public agencies are no longer able to determine how secure their eyeteeth years is now secure the data of its citizens it can say how long it will take to implement new functions how expensive the right is how much they could save and so forth will be less and less able to provide this information. dependency is the result of a business model with which the major software manufacturers and in particular microsoft have created monopolies a world wide keeping the source code a secret. modern software is written in programming languages the source code is the recipe for each software program or operating system. every

i.t. specialist can understand this source code but the computers don't understand source code it has to be transformed into binary machine code which only computers can read and understand. this is the source code for the command display hello world one of the first things you might learn in your first programming class. and this is what the command looks like translated into machine code. microsoft only makes the machine code available to its customers but we can't decipher it ourselves microsoft keeps its source code a secret and to protect itself from copycats. this is what's called the proprietary business model only the manufacturer is able to change improve correct and fix security gaps in the software for better or worse the users are completely

at the mercy of the manufacturer. the data belonging to every citizen from tax returns to parking fines flows through the enormous data centers maintained by our governments. we pay a visit to one of the high security server farms in hamburg we're not permitted to reveal its location let alone film it from the outside but all its security arrangements offer little protection against microsoft's vulnerabilities. so this is just one of several data point data center facilities data port is a public corporation owned by the state. we belong to the northern german federal states including lower saxony and its municipalities we only handle public sector data now show you one of our cooling rooms where the computers are kept. you can see them working away on both sides and there's enclosed spaces chemical. proof

this is the going what role does microsoft play. both proprietary and open source software in some areas proprietary software is used almost exclusively that includes as a pay for example also proprietary software but of course microsoft is used a lot of people are used to working with it and it has an almost de facto monopoly position. we know that we have to reduce our dependency and use various strategies to minimize his dependancy on a case by case basis but it's a balancing act. which hasn't been working out with microsoft over the past ten years the german government has doubled its outlay for microsoft licenses. microsoft microsoft is indeed a real challenge it's not only public agencies that use microsoft products but also industry and the private sector universities and so on. you could say we've created a culture that accepts this mechanism so it's a real challenge to create alternatives guys are not evil. alternatives to

microsoft have been around for a long time they're based on a fundamentally different principle called open source. in contrast to the proprietary software sold by microsoft and other companies open source software uses a source code that's publicly available. that's why hundreds of thousands of programmers around the world can improve it expand on it and fix bugs. the collective work carried out by this swarm of programmers identifies and closes security gaps and efficiently produces state of the art software including the world's most widely used operating systems linux and android unlike microsoft linux is available free of charge. any organization or administration can customize it for its own purposes without asking a corporation for permission but most government i.t.

managers believe that there is no alternative to microsoft in public administration even though open source software has become a profitable industry. i know that it's no longer true that alternatives don't exist that may be true twenty years ago when you had to install the software on your windows p.c. . so why aren't european states making the switch to free themselves from this dependency. it reminds me of the renewable energy debate people said solar power was impossible it didn't work it was too expensive look at what we have no on some days germany produces nearly one hundred percent of its electricity from renewables so how did that change come about because they made it easier provided incentives then all of a sudden people realized hey it does work it's the same with software. why such resistance from the authorities. i guess microsoft monopoly arose thirty five years ago when an entire industry has developed around it and many people are. vested in

maintaining it many are sitting in government and public agency i.t. departments they don't want things to change because they know it will cut into their business as this. modern open source programs can compete with microsoft products as the company open exchange demonstrates. these are so can this software replace the entire office package. in this office to think you can do everything with this software that you can do with microsoft for example here's the email program and then we have an address book that's of course you can manage appointments tasks to do lists and keep track of all your files schools that's the human. mind is the software also allows you to edit text. create spreadsheets and of course create presentations on your own so the. what do you deal with all the documents from other people public agencies

constantly have multiple people working on a single document then the boss has decided there's a lengthy workload you can't handle that can you. show your carrier you make it sound like using office software from the cloud instead of having it installed on your computer is completely normal but most people have never heard of it. you don't realize you're already using it if you're a one plus one or telecom vodafone arc or france telecom consummate and use their mail program or calendar you're already using our system you know what about your profit that we earn a living by offering professional support services to keep these systems up and running you know we only get paid by about one in every ten thousand users are on the run but they're very big and we earn enough from them that we can provide our services to the other ninety nine point nine nine nine percent are free of charge. not a good business it is yes we are growing forty five percent per year for the last

night. and for the. open source software has long been standard in private corporations the global giants of the digital economy such as facebook amazon google pay pal only use open source they would never give their competitor microsoft access to their information technology. but european governments continue to submit to the old monopoly signing one contract after the next. these contracts stipulate the terms and conditions for the government agencies use of microsoft programs the german ministry of the interior is legally obligated to allow inspection of such contracts but the ministry has blackened out all the key elements such as prices conditions and security requirements they say the reason is that microsoft is in forcing trade secrets in other words the corporation is permitted to decide what the public may

learn about its dealings with taxpayers' money. with this framework contracts the german government permits all state institutions from local authorities to parliament to obtain software directly from microsoft resellers. it's a business worth billions of euros. but it's legally questionable because agreements of this sort override the european union law it says that public authorities are prohibited from buying products and services exceeding the value of one hundred thirty five thousand euros from a single supplier without first issuing a public invitation to tender. that doesn't seem to worry peter but who's head of the german interior ministry how does he justify circumventing e.u. public procurement law. when the call for tender does take place microsoft doesn't sell its products directly and uses intermediaries who put in bids and compete with

one another. this is what that would be like if it were to strafe and buying new cars for its fleet and only inviting v.w. dealers to put in a bid excluding all other manufacturers that's not competition. the tenders are initially open to everyone but the clear majority of the german public sector decide in favor of the industry standard rather than an open source solution which they regard as an experiment. to expose them and for. every municipality every state administration puts out a call for tender in accordance with a framework contract we need new microsoft licenses who can give us the best deal. that may often be the case here but not necessarily in every case. it's not that simple either law doesn't allow public tenders to give preference to a specific company it also prohibits the specification of brand names and calls to

tender but when it comes to microsoft states appear to be flat. at the university of groningen in the netherlands. a lawyer specializing in i.t. and public procurement has studied this practice so to framework agreements with microsoft violate e.u. law. yeah yeah that's very clear it violates european law and when you ask organizations you know why are you doing this the people responsible for they usually know that that it finally it's european law but they will say well even the european commission itself is doing its. best to tom petty you will far exceed breaking its own rules my colleague maria majority from the investigate europe journalist team has been a long time correspondent in brussels and knows who to ask.

ok who are we going to meet now and now we are going to lead. the way i think in time because. for microsoft i was already told they are going to sign a new contract with microsoft next year so good luck to. next. with microsoft and. the plan is to go for a negotiated procedure with microsoft for. this top layer. and for call for tender with a reseller. for microsoft doesn't the practice to negotiate this framework contract violate the rules of procurement which demand open competition not that are there are different procedures foreseen by the picture metros and of course the procedure is called for tender but then the negotiated procedure is a procedure that exists in their own and it's fully legal and the conditions are

that there is only one provider that can provide this particular solution the technical solution so there is no other possibility and what we've seen is that we if we didn't do call for tender an open call for tender for provision we would land with microsoft anyway and it would be much more expensive because what they're doing now is negotiating a price list together with microsoft directly which gives this huge discount well it sounds very reasonable but this actually means that they have a problem within their organization. because they are obviously locked in. they are in a sub optimal situation because they are so dependent on working with microsoft that they are even thinking that they can't function without the microsoft software it says more about their own organization then.

the topic of law because it basically means that they have internal problem that they have to fix but it doesn't mean that there can't be this regard for human what does the procurement law exactly say for the procurement law describes. several situations in which you can ask for a brand name being locked in is not an excuse to disregard the procurement rules. there are alternatives. back in two thousand and four a social democratic mayor of munich christiane would decided the city administration would switch from microsoft windows to the open source linux operating system the project called the mox was considered a great success and was also copied in other european cities. in twenty twelve details writer who was the city's economic advisor at the time negotiated an

agreement with microsoft to relocate its german headquarters to munich. in twenty fourteen became unix mayor and since then the social democratic mayor has joined forces with the conservatives on the city council to bring the munich administration back into the microsoft fold. many of us in the c.s.u. were again that decision back then. it was a decision based purely on envy it will cost far more than one hundred million a monopolist always wants to make sure it gets off a follow up contract. it's a huge waste of money please reconsider this thank you. but the mayor rejected these data security and anti monopoly arguments in his closing statement he also gave another reason to abandon linux one of those was we've tried to create

workarounds but what we've been able to achieve doesn't compare to what i've seen in my private business dealings these past ten or fifteen years that is why i personally believe it would make sense to switch so can i call for the votes against the motion to. the greens the liberals the left and other opposition parties vote against the majority decide in favor thank you. it's to look at is the return to microsoft as payback for the company relocating its german headquarters to munich which is no negotiating a few years ago. no it certainly is not what i initiated and what we have voted for today's to improve our id modernize it and make it more effective and reliable for users in the administration and for our citizens. however a report showed that a large majority of city employees were happy with a limit system the report did find fault with munich's i.t.

administration but the problem was not with the linux software the problem was that the city gave i.t. administrators in the various departments too much leeway to chart their own course according to the former head of munich's i.t. department it was this lack of uniformity that was the problem not the underlying linux system city employees were not permitted to grant us an interview but an expert from the city i.t. department was willing to speak with us anonymously so is there some truth to the claim that the open source system in the munich city government didn't work properly and others in to are all very disappointed we've always tried to make sure it all works smoothly and we've been quite successful in that in our training courses people are saying why should the system be changed it works and what's ahead of others. thousand forms were adapted to work with open source software what will happen to them now. the new template system will have to be created from microsoft office that will be expensive every single template will need to be

converted or every department will have to manually create their own templates the way they used to do we'll have an explosion of data which will become unmanageable at some point this isn't about technology it's about the politics of linux it was just a bargaining chip. of course politics plays a role munich was ruled by the social democrats and greens for twenty four years and limericks was their project in twenty fourteen a new coalition came into power a grand coalition the christian social union the conservatives have always opposed the lima project and open source software and favored microsoft and now we have a new ma'am the former american favorite the linux system during the election dieter ita outed himself as a microsoft fan all of a sudden linux became the scapegoat when the new district heads had trouble using their cell phones they blamed it on linux unix had nothing to do with it but it was a convenient scapegoat of the incident. which

in back again is going to be very expensive for munich a preliminary calculation estimated that the return to microsoft will cost nineteen million euro's by twenty twenty not counting license fees. meanwhile the city of rome wants to move from microsoft to open source. even the italian army has begun to break away from microsoft its already replaced microsoft office some thirty thousand computers with the open source program libris office. we saw that leave the office and microsoft office were both equivalent for our purposes. we carried out a case study. we analyzed how people used microsoft office and realized that labor

office was just as good. when they compared the two programs we found no loss of productivity. that. this is a document in right or that one is in work but this is. it's the same. as always this is a medium term project which will take from twenty sixteen to twenty twenty to complete changing from word to labor offices saving us twenty eight million euros that's a considerable saving. the french national gendarmerie has gone a step further its switched office software and like the city of munich it switched from the windows to linux operating system resulting in some twenty million euros in savings over eight years but the national gendarmerie is now coming under

massive pressure our investigative team was shown an order from the french interior ministry instructing the giant armory to return to microsoft. so who is really behind this demand is the microsoft corporation wielding behind the scenes influence. from the french n.g.o.s which advocates for open source software has been observing this struggle for some time. two or three years ago bill gates the founder of microsoft came to france with his foundation and was received by the president of france a few months later we found out about a partnership with the ministry of education. they definitely have privileged access for example lobbyists from microsoft have e-mail addresses ending with intra day that's the same domain ending used by government ministries. so the

employees there regard them as colleagues. microsoft microsoft employees how email addresses in the ministries not only do they have access to the buildings they also have email addresses ending with intraday f.r. there's no separation between the two. you give an example the top lobbyist for microsoft even worked for a while as a parliamentary assistant so there are many revolving doors as they call it when someone has a parliamentary position or a ministry job and starts working for microsoft or the other way round they're very networked. no one in the french ministry of defense was willing to provide us any information about the cooperation with microsoft. but our investigative team has found an i.t. expert from the french government who is prepared to speak with us we have an

appointment in a neutral location the i.t. expert wants to remain anonymous so that he won't risk his job. paris colleagues know as also found documents that show how closely the french government cooperates with microsoft. you work for the french government we have a document here that shows an employee using a ministry of defense e-mail address. but this other document shows that the very same person is also a microsoft employee. how is this possible that microsoft understood this. unfortunately they're exploiting the carelessness of administrators who often register service providers with an email address of the administration they work for. that's a huge advantage for

a technician or project leader who is tasked with circulating microsoft technology . that they can pretend they're an employee of a government agency. when they're actually just a service provider. it appears that the french ministry of defense has had a secret agreement with microsoft for the past ten years even the french parliament wasn't informed of the agreement or its content. it's their country between the french ministry of defense and microsoft and we have no doubt that either amount of money or. it was all black you can see these all black and what is important in this country is the amount of money. they spend on that and it's all like in the amount of money and it was not even here in front of the senate because . i thought i was directed to the ministry of defense which should definitely because she just wasn't. the man for

a commission of inquiry. yet another redacted contract once again the private corporation has prohibited a government from fulfilling its legal obligation to inform the public the french parliament has resolved to investigate how much the state actually pays microsoft in licensing fees some sources believe it two hundred euros per workstation per year if the same applied to the anti e.u. that would amount to ten billion euros a year and that's money that could go a long way to underwriting an e.u. wide open source solution will france's parliamentarians succeed in breaking this conspiracy of silence. and. this seemed to me absolutely the same. i asked for this committee of inquiry because we didn't have to size figures it was the right and duty of a member of parliament to know how much a contract costs especially such an important. parent see there was no tendering

procedure the experts were against this program and there are other solutions for example. he has decided not to use microsoft and to subscribe to a specific contract with free linux software for economic and other reasons and this example was not followed by the ministry of defense. there was someone who said it was at least one hundred thirty million euro's but we fear that the figure is much higher. so there's been some pressure from the ministry of defense to ensure that there is no investigative commission so it's evident there was a form of lobbying excuse the iraqi word which came from microsoft. because digs into the entire french army uses microsoft programs what does this mean for national security and the sovereignty of france from close to think. that's

very serious because a potential attack on microsoft in the network of the ministry of defense theoretically endanger our soldiers and a whole series of military actions abroad. microsoft systems are also a security risk that overly complex and vulnerable and only the experts at microsoft know the source code it's something that the chaos computer club europe's largest association of hackers has long been criticizing they have factors can. cause have saved. had microsoft office is far more vulnerable than the open source libra office the italian military looked into this and it's also easy to demonstrate. every text

processing program stores a document in the form of lines of code that the user normally never sees in libra office this sentence we've typed generates ten lines of code data. that very same sentence in microsoft word generates more than one hundred lines of code data. so microsoft generates much more data that viruses can use to infiltrate a computer. that confirmed by the german office for information security or b.s.i. they say that the microsoft format offers a cyber attack of opportunity for attack. the security gap exploited by the wanna cry malware demonstrates the extent of the risk either microsoft security experts failed to notice the error for ten years even as it borrowed its way into a decade's worth of operating systems or they were aware of the vulnerabilities but

kept it a secret the u.s. national security agency or n.s.a. had already discovered the vulnerability and used it to develop its own espionage tool which it used until it was apparently leaked to cyber criminals so given this risk shouldn't the german government insist on the disclosure of the source code for all its software. after having read snowden's revelations over the past four years about how vulnerable we are and what methods the u.s. secret service is an essential part of snowden's publications is about the close elaboration between the corporations and the secret service and the fact that the corporations also glides to work with secret services they should have drawn the necessary conclusions from this. data security expert your highness caspar is also concerned about the risk from the u.s. intelligence services. the german constitution says the state must protect the data

of its citizens. there is a fundamental right to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of information technology systems. that are subject to american law. yeah the consequences yes the implications are of course very far reaching. we know that under the prism program the major american internet companies granted access to their data. was microsoft part of this program. yes among others. this shows of course how risky it is to enter into a dependency that you can't just suddenly get our own. we wanted to speak with microsoft about our investigation including questions related to data security and u.s. intelligence services but over four months they didn't grant us an interview our written inquiries also remained unanswered. by my colleague elissa

semantic came across a secret document from the german office for information security the b.s.i. according to the documents it's experts are also suspicious of microsoft as early as twenty fourteen before the current contract with microsoft was concluded they issued forty six requests for the company to fix security gaps in its software and to compel the company to meet its obligations to german governmental and public agencies. but wait till you see what's written on page twenty inquiries from the site of microsoft we ask the ministry of interior about this in their beer size catalogue of demands it says inquiries from the b.s.i. to microsoft sometimes go unanswered or are answered only with significant delay an increase in this behavior has been observed especially regarding questions that microsoft presumably finds uncomfortable those questions are usually ignored. that

this sounds like a large american corporation is giving the german data security or thirty the runaround. this is nice no that's not what is happening it's understandable that the b.s.i. would employ strong language in order to strengthen its own negotiating position microsoft microsoft might not necessarily want to provide information about problems and vulnerabilities when they may not believe there exist or when they think they can fix them very quickly or. the requirements fulfilled the requirements were fulfilled not under the contract itself. yes that's correct not all demands were met and we did indeed have to renegotiate. your welcome to speak to colleagues from the b.s.i. about the modahl it is they agreed on. process.

we try to do just that but the german office for information security replied unfortunately we are not currently available for an on camera interview but you are welcome to send us your questions in writing. we did that too but no reply was forthcoming. the european parliament has drawn its own conclusions from the snowden affair and has taken a tough stand government i.t. systems need to end their reliance on the americans. we need the commission we need the parliament to urge clearly on the member states to deliver rules and standards for nearly ten years young philip was an advocate for strong data protection laws in the european parliament. so if we ask europeans can break free of the closed source codes that microsoft and others insist on and switch to our own open source code we're taking

a risk of course that the european union and the european market could just become a kind of colony for these companies so we won't be able to control what happens to our data. in the you're going to get rooted in the start of the e.u. commission disagrees. with microsoft alternative on the. works that's i'm sorry but that's a flat out lie of course it's feasible to switch to open source software to process the files and danger of government organizations like the european commission those alternatives exist of open source software and. no there aren't enough suppliers and better is good does that and be done in providers the suppliers do exist they just aren't competitive that's the only difference to solve this problem the european union just needs to say in public tenders we want to open source to be the basic standard if we genuinely want to create an alternative it should be worth

our while to fully invest in a european model of open standards a kind of air bus project for digitalisation made in europe. to be something. in twenty thirty in the e.u. commission adopted a program that would enable european institutions and member states to liberate them. from that dependence on a handful of us software companies. why have the commissioners abandon this policy . i don't think we abundances this police here but the only solution is to invest more to catch the critic is that by using this microsoft monoculture in public i t. says terms these public systems are being held very vulnerable that same change our operating system so invent and no cyber threats anymore so my boss said rebuttal is a big difference in proprietary software you don't know the source code isn't that

such a security risk when you have a black box operating the public but not to use microsoft your pink microsoft is like a black box this window is full of enemies and let's use each of those microsoft software really in the interview you want to follow for the solution came from the european parliament itself to make the public source code a precondition in procurement for software for public ip. the old physical european commission has failed to respond despite the calls made by people like john called younker and uncle americal who have gone on record to urge the e.u. to achieve digital sovereignty but we see no moves in this direction. it will help me to perceive was the parliament completely wrong. i don't think so but we are using procurement systems to buy some new software it's an open competition for sorry for desktop software for office automation and for mail there is no

competition i don't think it's so simple but we just were prohibits a user of some pride of software and bend and no problems anywhere no cyber attacks and no cyber incidents anything oh no we will be happy oh i'm sorry it's already than others but the might just. issue is the elephant in the room which nobody wants to talk about and that is the reason why we do this film i don't think we have to intervene. in economical so we have to invest war if we make open source a criterion in public procurement of software for the public information technology systems this would create exactly this kind of alternative you're looking for and this would overcome this one up early to make open source the try to reopen would be a big bang for the software industry in the short period of time we would have great solutions for the public i t independent of the united states. that's for.

take time for europe as a whole to move in a different model promising direction. there. because it calls for trustworthy and open standards interoperability sustainability and maximum security and a reduction of the dependence on monopoly structures in hardware and software this was a parliamentary resolution what's being done to meet those demands of the day for the helm these demands didn't just spring up overnight bonds would be under discussion for a while because of principles we've always find. a new framework contract is currently under negotiation with microsoft. of course but what else can we do.

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dot com for science and research for a show. u.s. secretary of state mike pompei o has said the u.s. could help rebuild north korea's economy if the country gives up its nuclear weapons pompei made the comment as a news conference with his side korean counterpart ahead of a planned summit with the north he added that robust verification of denuclearization would be needed. a senior iranian cleric has threatened israeli cities with annihilation as tensions saw between the two countries is.