I really don't get it. It's against the German constitution and yet there are still politicians pushing for that, again and again. We should make it mandatory that when something is clearly against the constitution you loose your job as a politician. It won't work anyway. It's the same spiel wasting so much money and time. Do we know which lobby group/party is pushing for that yet again?
Is it clearly against the constitution?
What happens when the constitution clashes with EU law?
Can the constitution be amended and is it likely if there is a clash with EU law on this issue?
Enormous pressure can be brought to bear in politicians over something like this. The most prominent British politician to oppose the Online Safety Act in the UK is being labelled as "helping people like Jimmy Saville" by the government (Saville was a TV presenter and notorious child abuser) .
> What happens when the constitution clashes with EU law?
Usually a standoff based on whether the EU was delegated authority on the topic. If the delegation happened then EU law has precedence but depending on the topic national constitutional courts might ignore that which becomes a constitutional crisis
In this specific case it's much more likely that the ECJ shoots down the chat control part of the law before it gets to that anyway
It is against it and the law was revoked twice already by liberal politician SLS: 2nd March 2010 - 1 BvR 256/08 I don't like this rhetorical style were easy to prove facts are denounced with questions to evoke uncertainty.
If you now say this is not applicable as this is about storing connection data you don't understand the issue in full: This is a deeper incision than just storing connection logs. This violates a more fundamental right. We are talking about chats here. Not what IPs you connected to at what time (and that law was canned as violating the entire constitution, which i cited with the state's decision above). There is no middleground here.
No, I am not arguing anything, I was just asking.
Right sorry the topic is very exhausting and I extrapolated my frustration, assuming you are interested, it came back in 2015 and was canned again in 2019: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorratsdatenspeicherung_in_Deu...
I am tired of Germany needing constant chemos because unconstitutional laws grow back. They pass faster into action, than you can excise them in Karlsruhe. The mechanism for Germany to self-heal is very very slow. This is an imbalance that makes it hard to fight such laws. They change a miniscule detail and it can pass a 3rd and 4th time.
As I understand it, the pressure for a surveillance state comes from the EU, right? While Germany and countries in their cultural sphere like Austria are fundamentally opposed to that. If that's the case, it won't ever change unless the EU changes
I'm afraid Germany ('s government) is not opposed at the moment and there is enough internal pressure as well. We had our fair share of moments getting surveilance like that and fighting it. I bet my ass off, that Ursula von der Leyen, the c... who tried to make it German law had her hands in that as well.
Ursula has been in favor since the beginning.
> Among the few traces of Thorn’s activities in the EU’s lobby transparency register is a contribution of 219,000 euros in 2021 to the WeProtect Global Alliance, the organisation that had a video conference with Kutcher and Von der Leyen in late 2020.
Thorn is the main lobbying group behind these proposals.
https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
If any other country should know better, you'd think it would be Germany. Ursula in particular married into a family which was both persecuted as Anabaptists and participated in persecution by being Holocaust enforcers, so how on Earth is she not aware of the slippery slope here?
Like most people on this planet in positions of power - corruption and cognitive dissonance
the UK essentially does not have a constitution nor any significant judicial authority over lawmaking
I was replying to a comment about the German constitution
> Do we know which lobby group/party is pushing for that yet again?
tldr: A US based surveillance company called Thorn has been lobbying for this for years.
‘Who Benefits?’ Inside the EU’s Fight over Scanning for Child Sex Content https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
Chat control & Kutcher: Ombudsman criticizes secrecy https://www.heise.de/en/news/Chat-control-Kutcher-Ombudsman-...
A constitution is just a piece of paper. The ruling class can discard it as they wish.
The current ruling class consists of people who did well in (somewhat, at least) transparent rule-of-law conditions. They can discard the laws if they want I guess, but they should take a lesson from Putin’s Russia—they are rich now, but without laws some intelligence officer can chuck them out of windows until someone in their family tree is willing to pay up. (Not that they need to look to Russia for an example, it is just a recent one, their own history books are full of these guys).
Actually, I think they are aware of that, which is why they keep trying to do the paperwork properly.
> It's against the German constitution
No one cares. Like anywhere in the world.
I think your comment was taken as "no one cares about Germany"/being snarky. But it can also be read as "those who should do not respect the constitution, like anywhere in the world". I assume the latter, am I correct?
'Constitution' arguments are used by ones in power only to server their agenda. Constitution argument won't save us from the surveillance. Most of the time western countries play 'national security' and 'think of the children' to circumvent the constitution and have ~100% success rate.
I don't feel like that's true in Germany. The constitutional court would like a word I guess. They have a pretty big history regarding surveilance and such.
So shouldn't be a concern then for Germans? Somehow I don't buy that. See for example https://forum.torproject.org/t/tor-relays-artikel-5-e-v-anot... and that's not an isolated event. Before that were jabber chat nodes.
So did they go to court? I think that would be crucial to rectify that. If not, they let the rogue agents have a free hand.
Be involved in the legal battle (especially with the government) is a punishment already. The state has unlimited power to haras and do that frequently.
Just saying "It's unconstitutional" doesn't really cut it. It's a question for the courts to decide (based on the constitution).
A constitution is the basic big-picture law of the country. The court’s interpretation should be easy to guess. Otherwise, the people won’t feel like it is their document.
Rule of law is aided by laws that people know how to follow.
At least in America, a classic go to for Republican and democrats alike for opposing legislation is "that's unconstitutional!"
Sure, I’m from the US as well. In our case, I think this stems from multiple problems—the popular understanding of the constitution and the letter of the thing have diverged, and also the Supreme Court has gone in a third totally unrelated direction. So it becomes a convenient rhetorical meme. (IMO, we should the thing once a generation and have the populace re-ratify it with a high consensus, so we’re all on the same page).
I’m not sure if that’s the case in Germany though.
as the constitution doesn't have that high of a place in our identity it's more something for constitutional lawyers and higher courts. I think there's more tension between our constitutional law and that of the EU's law. for most people that's background noise I guess.
In this particular question there are also fundamental human rights that are part of the EU legislation where it is fully plausible that ECJ would render any law implementing the EU law. Like Ipred, where our politicians tried to pass laws following it but it got struck down again and again. No idea if they have given up yet.
They did already, multiple times now. Hence my original comment.