BERLIN – German police and intelligence agencies have excessive access to citizens’ mobile communications and the internet, the country’s Constitutional Court said on Friday, ordering that existing laws be tightened.
It was the court’s latest decision to support personal privacy over public safety concerns in the digital sphere, which together has made the country a world leader in protecting personal privacy.
Critics charge that the series of court decisions could hinder the security services’ ability to prevent crimes and terrorist attacks.
Under current law, the police and prosecutors can access an individual’s Internet and cell phone data in the course of a criminal investigation, allowing them to view basic personal information that is stored by telecommunications providers.
The German Federal Police may request these providers for someone’s personal data as part of the investigation. That can include a person’s name, phone numbers, address or IP addresses, and date of birth.
Law enforcement authorities use the information to help them piece together crimes or locate terrorism suspects. But information can be collected without any concrete evidence linking an individual to a particular crime, raising the fear that the information may be abused.
The court ruled Friday that while the transmission of such data was legally permissible, officials have too much leeway to obtain the information. He ordered that current laws be reviewed by 2021 to ensure that “they sufficiently limit the purposes for which the data is used.”
That is, the court ruled that only when the police or investigators have concrete evidence linking an individual to a specific crime will they be allowed to access digital information.
Katharina Nocun, a civil rights activist, and Patrick Breyer, a member of the European Parliament for the Pirate Party, brought the case to court in 2013.
They celebrated Friday’s ruling as a victory for personal privacy rights and democracy.
“The ruling confirms that the legal obstacles to widespread invasion in the private sphere are too low,” said Nocun. “Targeted interventions instead of new surveillance interfaces should be the name of the game in a democracy.”
Nocun made a connection to the recent scandals that have rocked the German police, involving far-right sympathizers within its ranks, suspected of leaking information to neo-Nazi groups that have threatened lawyers and left-leaning activists, including herself. She said she had received several online threats from groups identified with links to the police.
“This experience only strengthened my determination that we need robust legal controls for the authorities’ access to confidential data to prevent abuse,” Nocun said on Twitter.
In a 2012 ruling on the matter, the court found that in an increasingly digital world, researchers needed the “simplest possible method of tracing people’s phone numbers” to carry out their work.
But Friday’s ruling was the last attempt to review that decision, and the court suggested that telecommunications providers develop a “back door” that allows authorities to access the information they are entitled to, while protecting the most sensitive people. data.
