Is This Really a Success?

Some news papers call the coalition negotiations about inner and security politics between CDU and FDP a success for the FDP. They state that the FDP has reached a lot. So let's see what was achieved:

• Data retention will remain for situations of danger
• To do computer surveillance there has to be a request of the Office of the Federal Prosecutor
• Websites will not be blocked, but deleted, for one year, there will be a new decision then

Sounds good, but you do not know how it was before.

Data retention

Data retention has always been said to be limited to major crimes. This has always been the main argument to introduce it, because otherwise there would have been more protest. It was only allowed to use data retention in cases of terrorism, if this is not a case of danger for our Minister of the Interior - Mr. Schäuble - then I am an idiot. He always forces new surveillance claiming that terrorism was the biggest threat in Germany.

Computer surveillance

There are discussions if computer surveillance is evel legal in Germany, more precisely if it is constitutional or not, since a constitutional complaint has to be evaluated before. In Bavaria, however, it is allowed for the protection of the constitution and a document about payments for a spy-software has been leaked.

I do not really see much difference between a police office asking a lawyer for computer surveillance and the Prosecutor's Office, since both institutions are working for the state and want to control people.

Internet censorship

There have been some mistakes, so the current law is not active, yet. The new coalition settlement plans to wait with blocking internet websites for one year and evaluate the achievements then. However, the Federal Criminal Police Office always asked and pledged for the new law to block websites instead of shutting down the servers. That is why I do not think that they will put too much effort into shutting down servers now.

While independant activists have shown many times that sending an e-mail to the providers is enough to shut down child pornography in most cases, the Federal Criminal Police Office still claimed they needed the new possibility to block websites.

Conclusion

That is why I do not regard the coalition negotiations as such a big success for the liberal FDP, but I did not expect too much anyway.

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Thursday, October 15, 2009