NOT true. The regulations that you have in mind never made it into law.

Source: https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/bundesrat-stoppt...

The German government is pretty good at putting on a face of respectability and proper process, while also doing bad things. I'm reminded of the fact that the state began a criminal investigation of FT after they reported on Wirecard's fraud on the insistence of Wirecard itself.

Germany has a massive corruption problem on the higher levels.

It's not as visible for outsiders, because nations with corruption issues usually also have police and office workers essentially doing shakedowns to do their jobs, and that's not really a thing in Germany.

What is quiet widespread is politicians and office worker enriching themselves either directly from budgets theyre responsible for or by doing things for corporations which pay them handsomely.

The mask scandal brought it to light.

I wish it did, but honestly all the mask deals were pocket change (you can't really say the mask scandal, considering how many there were).

Take our Kanzler for example. He was involved in stealing over 50 million €. (CumEx) Not only didn't he get punished, now he's also in the highest position of the German government. And I wish it was an extreme example, but it's really not.

The health minister is responsible for the current health care crisis, which he kicked off over 10 years ago. Thanks to him clinics prefer to amputate diabetes patients over treatment, because it pays more.

Each of the ministers has done similar things such as getting an extra 150k€ salary from the coal industry etc.

Yep all while people working for the financial regulator Bafin traded Wirecard stock in their personal accounts.

Not that I doubt you, but do you have a source?

Maybe I mixed up something and this is the wrong law: The "Gesetz zur Modernisierung der Rechtsgrundlagen der Bundespolizei" was accepted by the Bundestag, but finally the Bundesrat did not agree. https://dip.bundestag.de/vorgang/gesetz-zur-modernisierung-d...

While I am very much opposed to being spied on without a warrant[0], the case where only government bodies can do this is better than the case where anyone can do it.

Of course, the existence of a mechanism to enable this is itself a thing which can be exploited by the exact same criminals I’m most concerned about with data retained by private businesses, so it’s not much of an improvement even though the attack surface is probably smaller.

[0] and indeed this is why I was already looking to leave the UK even before Brexit; the Investigatory Powers Act gives the Welsh Ambulance Service access to anyone’s “internet connection records” without a warrant.

I prefer the case where no one does it.

Private corporations at least do it for money. Governments do it for power. I think it’s a hard case to make that that’s a better reason than to do it for money.

Likewise I would prefer nobody does it, but that isn’t feasible given how easy it is to do it.

But… money is one kind of power, so I don’t think it’s “better”.

Given what happened in living memory to a previous government in (East) Germany that abused surveillance power, I both accept the concern, and yet also don’t expect it to actually apply here, at least not until about 2040 when the last people who remember experiencing the receiving end of it retire.

In smaller democracies the government tend to serve the people. In that case the purpose of the spying is to serve the people and not a government power grab, that is how democracies are intended to work.

Also large enough corporations tend to do things for power reasons rather than money, as once you are a billionaire your money is mostly just a means to exert power so trading money for power is what you do. And at that size they start to intermingle with governments, making the acts of the company hard to separate from acts of the government.

"The people" don't have any more right to my data than anyone else.

For the people is excellent propaganda, but it’s not rooted in a kind history, nor justification to spy on your own citizens without probable cause nor warrant to do so.

A small democracy can still be an illiberal democracy, and a large democracy can still be a liberal democracy. However the size of the democracy nor the probable liberalness of a democracy should serve as a grant for arbitrary power wielded on behalf of anyone, even “the people”.

Maybe top-100 population US cities don’t count as “small democracies” in your definition. But if they do, I’d argue that small democracies do plenty to protect owners of capital at the expense of people in the lower half of wealth owners.

For example, take the surveillance and excess force against protestors during the summer of 2020 in the US (various judges and courts have agreed that some of the most high-profile police actions were illegal.)

Without warrant or accountability?

How would they go on about infecting a PC?

Crazy that the app stores play along.

Do warrants really make that much of a difference? I don't really see anything that could be considered incentive or control for keeping that mechanism from slowly (or not slowly at all) degenerating into a rubberstamping process.

I could easily imagine a system that leaves case by case decisions completely to law enforcement practitioners, but constrains them with paper trail requirements (accountability, I do agree with that part) and, most importantly but unfortunately kind of irreconcilable with the legal mindset, an artificial quota that forces them to actually think about the case. I believe that a system like that might in the end lead to less frivolous eavesdropping than one where everything is fair game as soon as they get someone authorized to sign off a form. "I got it signed off" goes a long way when it comes to questions of moral licencing: suddenly it becomes someone else's job to feel bad about it if maybe someone should.

Would the warrant describe what is being searched for and why? If so could that be used to challenge unrelated "evidence" to the approved purpose?

As in motivated law enforcement would want to avoid a questionable warrant that could ruin all their other achievements related to the case? Certainly not in Germany, where the admissibility of evidence is not really a factor: if evidence is assumed to be true then it exists no matter the provenance, if you want to sue the obtaining party for the obtainment process that's a separate case.

And what about situations where the surveillance doesn't even result in a trial? If a suspicion is made up to gain e.g. intelligence over some personal opponent (or personal opponent of someone the eavesdropper swaps favors with) evidence disadmittance couldn't even be an issue at all. But the party requesting the warrant would find it comparatively easy to appease their conscience with "nothing I wrote in the warrant request was a lie". I believe that most people doing bad things don't really like to acknowledge that to themselves, and that many who might actually talk themselves into requesting a questionable warrant would rather not risk running out of "wiretap wildcards" they might later need for doing their actual job. Of course a system trying to cause self-regulation with a quota could still be designed in dysfunctional ways (e.g. if there were "leftover wildcards" at the end of a quarter, those would be powerful fuel for abuse), but with a bit of care those pitfalls should be avoidable.

at least in the States one effective counterforce to this concern is that judges are very adamant about the separation of policy making (legislation) and the courts (judiciary). Most judges are conservative (read 'purist') about the doctrine of the separation of the branches of government and don't take well to pressures from the other two. The upshot is that warrant issuance is seen as a vital part of their domain and they don't sell it away.