By Christina Maas – Reclaim The Net
For half a century, Germany’s privacy laws were treated like sacred scripture. Politicians swore by them, courts fortified them, and bureaucrats turned them into a national export. Other countries rolled out surveillance programs; Germany rolled out lectures about why that was a terrible idea. It was all rooted in the same ugly history lesson: if you give the state a big enough file on you, sooner or later you’ll end up in it.
That memory ran deep. The Nazi regime used personal records like ammunition, and the East German Stasi built a domestic surveillance industry so bloated it could have applied for EU funding.
Postwar Germany responded by making privacy a central pillar of its democratic identity. The Federal Constitutional Court even invented a “right to informational self‑determination,” which sounded academic but translated roughly to: “The government doesn’t get to rummage through your life just because it’s bored.”
Privacy commissioners became feared watchdogs who could slap down ministries and corporations alike. Every time politicians tried to sneak through a new security law, they’d be met with lawsuits, public outrage, and years of procedural trench warfare. It was tedious, but that was the point; democracy is supposed to make snooping inconvenient.
Now comes the Interior Ministry’s summer special: a bill that would let authorities hack devices without suspicion, track every airline passenger automatically, and scrap independent oversight.
We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.
The public got two weeks to respond, right in the middle of vacation season.
The irony is hard to miss. The country that once treated surveillance as a democratic contaminant is now writing a rulebook for how to do it more efficiently. If passed, the law will bury one of the last political legacies Germany could still actually be proud of.
The Federal Ministry of the Interior produced the 170‑page draft bill, the “Draft of a Bill to Modernize the Federal Police Act,” which reads like it was written by someone with a grudge against civil liberties. It’s now circulating among state governments and a few polite associations, as if the public’s role in all this is to hear about it after it’s already inevitable.
At the top of the proposal’s wish list: suspicion‑free device hacking. Federal police would get the green light to plant “state trojans,” their charming term for government‑built malware, into your phone or computer.
Once in, they could silently record encrypted conversations, copy stored files, and watch your digital life unfold in real time.
In other democracies, hacking into someone’s personal device without cause is called illegal. Here, it’s being rebranded as “prevention.” Prevention of what?
That’s classified, but you can assume it involves the government preventing you from having a private life.
Then there’s the airline passenger tracking upgrade. Right now, authorities need to identify a “risk route” and request the passenger list.
Under the new plan, every international flight in or out of Schengen becomes a “risk route” by default. Passenger data would be delivered to police automatically, no questions asked, no warrants signed.
The ministry insists this is simply “removing burdensome administrative procedures.”
One of the few meaningful roadblocks to mass surveillance, the “construction order” requirement, is also on the chopping block.
Currently, before police can build automated databases on people, they have to get formal approval and consult the Federal Data Protection Commissioner. The draft bill would erase that step entirely. Former commissioner Ulrich Kelber says this would mean “elimination of an important data protection control instrument.”
And this bill isn’t shy about stocking up on gadgets. Drones, anti‑drone systems, silent SMS tracking, IMSI catchers to pinpoint mobile phones, DNA collection on a broader scale, license plate scanners, undercover operations, and body‑worn cameras all get expanded play.
Movement bans and compulsory check‑ins make an appearance, too.
In earlier reform drafts, there were half‑hearted gestures toward transparency: officer pseudonyms to track misconduct, stop receipts to document why you were questioned. Both ideas have been quietly cut.
Technically, citizens have a chance to respond. In practice, the “consultation period” is two weeks in the middle of the summer holidays.
By the time most people hear about it, the ink will already be drying.