For half a century, Germany’s privacy laws were treated like sacred scripture. Politicians swore by them, courts fortified them, and bureaucrats turned them into a national export. Other countries rolled out surveillance programs; Germany rolled out lectures about why that was a terrible idea. It was all rooted in the same ugly history lesson: if you give the state a big enough file on you, sooner or later you’ll end up in it.
That memory ran deep. The Nazi regime used personal records like ammunition, and the East German Stasi built a domestic surveillance industry so bloated it could have applied for EU funding.
Postwar Germany responded by making privacy a central pillar of its democratic identity. The Federal Constitutional Court even invented a “right to informational self‑determination,” which sounded academic but translated roughly to: “The government doesn’t get to rummage through your life just because it’s bored.”
Privacy commissioners became feared watchdogs who could slap down ministries and corporations alike. Every time politicians tried to sneak through a new security law, they’d be met with lawsuits, public outrage, and years of procedural trench warfare. It was tedious, but that was the point; democracy is supposed to make snooping inconvenient.
Now comes the Interior Ministry’s summer special: a bill that would let authorities hack devices without suspicion, track every airline passenger automatically, and scrap independent oversight.
We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.
Hellbound and Down 
One thought on “Germany Turns Its Back on Decades‑Old Privacy Protections with Sweeping Surveillance Bill”