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...

> the "inviolability of the home" human dignity concept doesn't exist in the US.

Maybe not under that term, but for example, almost the only place an American's 4th Amendment protections against search and seizure apply is in their home. Law enforcement can search their garbage at the curb, monitor their [edit: public] movements via camera and license plate monitoring, etc., look them up online, all without warrants [*]. They can't do that in someone's home.

[*] I'm pretty sure no warrant is required to search curbside trash or do most online research.

The distinction here is whether police can secretly enter a home to plant bugs, &c. In the US, this is routine; in Germany, this is (was?) taboo.

(FYI, you can escape * as \* to get it to display as *).

Is this even practical anymore? A non-technical person can set up video surveillance on their home for a couple hundred bucks. Why wouldn't a criminal do that? I think the days of the FBI planting a microphone in a lamp on Tony Soprano's basement are over.

It's hard to set up video surveillance in your home without inadvertently providing much of the surveillance data the law enforcement officers were after, especially for non-technical people.