Kabinett beschliesst Online-Durchsuchung [ger]
In respect of the danger of international terrorism, the german Cabinet has decided a reformation of the “Law of the Criminal Police Office”, which includes:
- dragnet investigation
- use of undercover agents
- video surveillance (the BKA would accept surveillance of innocents if they have contacts to suspects)
- online searching (the BKA installs a certain software to spy on the suspect’s data; plans to install the software by entering the suspect’s habitation have been discareded)
(http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/BKA-Gesetz)
This is just a very imprecise outline of the bill which is still going to be passed to the Bundestag. There it will hopefully probably undergo some changes as some of the parliamentary parties have spoke out against certain parts of the bill.
The circumstances under which the “online research” will be coming into effect are also formulated quite spongily and i am probably not able to translate those bills adequately. Other sources in my blogroll do a much better job in reporting on this kind of news (though most of it is in German).
Still, my intention of this post was to point attraction at this very important issue. If we’re not attentive enough to recognize and interpret massive changes in certain laws that might affect us, or influential parts of society surrounding us (journalism, authors, scientists etc.), we might get into really big trouble when it comes to the expression of free thoughts and opinions when those laws get abused by despotic authorities in the present or future. Things like data retention get pushed into twilight by wiretapping scandals of huge communication companies throughout Europe and should become questioned by any citizen. Nowadays there are many different ways to speak out against stuff like that: one prominent source concerning data retention in Germany would be vorratsdatenspeicherung.de[en/de], but there are probably many others in your language.
