German spy software gets a limited ”Go“

The Constitutional Supreme Court of Germany (Bundesverfassungsgericht) decided last week that the online investigation of a suspect’s computer is permissible under the German constitution. Technology-wise, this would mean that the police can purposefully infect a suspect’s computer with spy software (a so-called Trojan) that would relay information on that person’s hard-drive back to the police.

The Ministry of the Interior will soon implement this decision into the criminal code of law and the police’s investigative practices. The court’s decision does not give the police ”carte blanche“ to spy on people. Instead they deemed that this type of cyber spying is a violation of privacy rights and is only acceptable in exceptional cases and only under the supervision of a judge. As reported by Spiegel, Wolfgang Schäuble, the German Minister of the Interior, already tried to calm the public’s fears by saying this new instrument will be applied in only a “few, but critical cases”.

Yesterday, he again reminded the public in an interview about the imminent danger Germans face, underscored by intelligence agencies who concluded that Germany is a target for Islamic terror and that Al-Qaeda’s leadership has made the decision to prepare for attacks against Germany.

The BBC pointed out the irony of this advanced but intrusive technology to be applied in a country that has “a historic fear of state intrusion, dating back to the Stasi secret police in the East and the Nazi-era Gestapo.” According to the BBC, this new law makes Germans “the most spied upon people in Europe”.