Berlin Approves New Expansion of Police Surveillance Powers

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 has always had the power to conduct these searches [0]; the "inviolability of the home" human dignity concept doesn't exist in the US. (I'll defer to German people to explain this concept).

As explained in heise.de[1] (in German) about a parallel law being enacted in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern,

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

[0] e.g. https://www.npr.org/2011/08/02/138916011/home-visits-and-oth... ("Home Visits And Other 'Secrets Of The FBI'")

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

It's so frustrating that every other comment in this thread is people giving their pet opinion about the headline and what it means about the state of the world / the inherent authoritarianism of Germany / whatever, and nobody else is commenting on the contents.

The controversial measures the article lists are things like:

> Police may now install state-developed spyware, known as trojans, on personal devices to intercept messages before or after encryption. If the software cannot be deployed remotely, the law authorizes officers to secretly enter a person’s home to gain access.

> The revised law also changes how police use body cameras. Paragraph 24c permits activation of bodycams inside private homes when officers believe there is a risk to life or limb.

Those seem like... pretty reasonable things for the police to do, presuming it has a warrant? And if the law authorizes doing these things without warrants, maybe the article should have lead with that?

Ctrl+F-ing "warrant" in the article doesn't give me any result, which makes me feel this article isn't very serious.

Sounds like horrible overreach to me, even if such activities are legal in America (when did American police become the gold standard that Europe needs to emulate???!!)

Seriously, searching your home with a warrant is one thing. Doing it secretly without the homeowner knowing about it afterwards is some Stasi shit. Are they going to steal your dirty underwear too? And installing malware on the computers of people merely suspected of a crime is even more insane.

> And installing malware on the computers of people merely suspected of a crime is even more insane.

But it's not "merely suspected"! It's "suspected with enough evidence to convince a judge to issue the warrant". These are completely different things, and to intentionally confound the two is wildly disingenuous.

I don't see how that's much better; a judge is just one guy and he's only hearing the cops' side of the story since you aren't allowed to know you've been accused, let alone present your side of the story.