Berlin Approves New Expansion of Police Surveillance Powers

https://reclaimthenet.org/berlin-approves-new-expansion-of-police-surveillance-powers

42•robtherobber•1h ago

Comments

LightBug1•55m ago

Spit balling now ... I just feel like the years have rolled on by so quickly now, that we've aged out of all of the lessons we had to learn before. And now we're going to have to learn them all over again.

znort_•45m ago

we ought to stop these decadent crooks from plunging us into fascism and war just to rescue their waning privilege (again), but somehow i don't think we will. so, yeah, lessons to be relearned ahead.

mothballed•34m ago

Classical liberalism is a rare blip of an exception in the history of civilization. As Milton Friedman says, and I paraphrase, it's quite remarkable it happened in the first place, but there's no real guarantee those conditions might ever arise again and no real expectation that it's realistic to think it will be recreated again in any particular desired timespan.

lysace•41m ago

Fighting extremist terrorism requires tough measures. This one is a bit extra though:

> If the software cannot be deployed remotely, the law authorizes officers to secretly enter a person’s home to gain access.

Clear Das Leben der Anderen vibes. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others)

As usual, the devil is in the details. How much suspicion is required, what's the process, etc. (I assume that a judge needs to sign off.)

danielbln•32m ago

And as always, plenty of oil runs down that slope to make it slippery. First it's terrorists, then heavy crime, then petty crime, then small things, then it's whoever the powers that be don't deem deserving of freedom. We've been down that road on Germany, but history rhymes, as the saying goes.

lysace•29m ago

The slippery slope argument always seemed... slippery, to me.

alephnerd•5m ago

The same people who complain about "slippery slopes" are the same people who bemoan the fact that American, Chinese, Russian, and even Vietnamese [0][1] intelligence operate with de facto impunity in Germany and the EU.

Europeans can no longer afford to be idealists like they were in the 2000s.

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-25/berlin-ki...

[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-18/vietnam-p...

nabnob•24m ago

What are you calling "extremist terrorism"?

lysace•22m ago

E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Berlin_truck_attack (13+1 deaths, 56 injured)

josefritzishere•18m ago

That was almost 10 years ago. That does not an existential threat make.

lysace•16m ago

There have been a number of similiar attacks in Germany since. There are no signs of this stopping.

Noone claimed it was an existential threat.

sapientiae3•6m ago

The interesting thing is that the laws being created to protect against such extreme attacks will be used against the people when they are controlled by an extreme group.

mytailorisrich•14m ago

Yes. Who decides? Can the police just decide at will? Do they need a warrant?

Secret access to plant bugs is how the FBI beat the mafia in the US in many cases in the 80s and 90s. But there were strict rules.

alephnerd•9m ago

Most likely under the same tests the the G10 Act has.

perihelions•6m ago

The explanation is deceptively unclear, IMO. What's being authorized is court-ordered searches of a type that were previously prohibited, even for courts to authorize, by strict privacy laws. The US always had these searches all along; the "inviolability of the home" privacy concept doesn't exist in the US.

As explained in heise.de (in German) about the analogous law in Mecklenburg-Pomeriania,

> "For the online search, the deputies now also grant the law enforcement the right to secretly enter and search apartments with judicial permission."

https://www.heise.de/news/Mecklenburg-Vorpommern-Durchsuchun...

astro1138•6m ago

After decades of a liberal and left senate, Berliners reelected CDU who bankrupted Berlin 25 years ago.

ndr•3m ago

Yet another step towards Turnkey Totalitarianism

https://creativetimereports.org/2013/06/25/surveillance-and-...

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