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The German Federal Supreme Court (BGH) in Karlsruhe ruled, on 5 February, that, according to the German Code of Criminal Procedure (StPO), online police snooping was illegal.
As the court argued, StPO had no provisions to allow the authorities to perform online snooping, the code allowing only overt searches.
Magistrate Ulrich Hebenstreit had already ruled against house searches arguing that such searches had to take place in the presence of the person affected. He emphasized that the data stored on computers could often be confidential and compared online spying measures to electronic eavesdropping.
The Protection of the Constitution Act on the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia has recently included a provision that allows online PC searches against which a complaint of unconstitutionality is presently being prepared.
Consequently, Federal Minister of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble, is now asking the legislators to create a legal basis for the criminal prosecutors to perform online searches ,that he considers indispensable.
Jörg Crozier, President of the German Criminal Police Office, asked also for new legislation to support these actions and stated "We have to be able to keep up with new technologies when unscrupulous criminals hide on the Internet, where they can plan their attacks and prepare their criminal actions."
At the same time, he wanted to assure the German citizens that they shouldn't worry about the Government monitoring them in a way that would violate their rights. "These measures will not even affect 99.9 percent of the population."
Ziercke stated that the Internet was playing a major part in the war against terrorism, child pornography, neo-Nazi propaganda and other types of crimes but can also play an important role in committing those crimes. "The Internet is the criminal platform of the future. In fact, it is the criminal platform of today."
On the other hand, Burkhard Hirsch, the former vice president of the lower chamber of Germany's Federal Parliament and a member of the opposition Free Democratic Party (FDP), considers online search by the police of a PC as "worse than a major eavesdropping operation." He declared to the German newsmagazine DerSpiegel that spying a computer through the Internet is a "more brutal form of intrusion" than previous criminal investigation methods.
Surreptitious online searches of PCs are illegal (6.02.2007)
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/84867
German criminology czar believes that online searches
are urgently needed (7.02.2007)
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/84908
Germany outlaws secret police snooping (6.02.2007)
http://www.out-law.com/page-7737
EDRI-gram: Proposal of computers online searching in Germany (20.12.2006)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number4.24/computer-online-searching