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.