Germany has passed an unprecedented spate of new online surveillance and security laws which critics say jeopardize security rather than guarantee it.
The data protection group Digitalcourage has complained to the Constitutional court about a federal law allowing the use of Trojan spyware by government authorities with the Berlin-based NGO Society for Civil Rights (GFF) and a handful of lawmakers from the Free Democratic Party (FDR) expected to file a similar complaint later this week, Deutsche Welle reported.
The plaintiffs argue that the law, enacted less than a year ago, that allows authorities to read encrypted messages with the help of secretly installed spyware on computers and cellphones violates several constitutional rights and “jeopardizes security rather than guarantees it.”
The authorities, for their part, insist that the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) intercepts encrypted communications and keeps an eye on online activity only when investigating terrorism and other crimes.
They also believe that messaging apps with end-to-end encryption, such as WhatsApp or Telegram, should be intercepted just like telephone conversations and traditional text messages.
“We cannot let the Internet become a legal vacuum,” BKA chief Holger Munch has told the German daily Handelsblatt.
“We must protect citizens and companies. This means we must be able to investigate this space,” he argued.
Critics still fear that that the…
