New prevention tools

The new technical possibilities have so far been used very little in practice, and especially not on a broad scale, for crime prevention. What they all have in common – the secret surveillance of PCs and smartphones by means of so-called state trojans, intelligent video surveillance or the use of the possibilities of big data analysis for preventive police purposes – they all have in common that all new technical possibilities bring the risk of massive impairment of fundamental rights. For online searches, for example, the Federal Constitutional Court recognised this already ten years ago and tried to limit the use of this highly invasive technical investigation element under constitutional law. However, this was at a time when the first iPhone was being launched on the market. The situation at that time has changed massively and dramatically with digitalisation as we know it today. In my view, there is a literal threat of total surveillance of the individual and the combinations of technical possibilities obviously entail even greater risks of abuse and, as can already be seen in some states around the world, can lead to drastic restrictions on the basic freedoms that we have been painstakingly fought for. In particular, the possibilities of secretly monitoring our digital selves, I consider highly problematic. Surveillance technologies to overcome, for example, encryption, anonymity and so on are already available today. There is a great demand for such technologies worldwide, so this is certainly a good deal for the manufacturers. In a state governed by the rule of law, it is, in my view, very important to ensure that these surveillance technologies are only used to the extent that the constitution and, in particular, people’s fundamental rights, especially their personal rights, permit this. In the analogous world, a lawyer once said, the evaluation of a diary would be the extreme limit in a criminal prosecution procedure under the rule of law. I would transfer that for security purposes: that would be the outermost limit in a constitutional state. That is all we are allowed to do. Evaluation of a diary. Nowadays we aim to enter the digital personality. If you compare what you would write in a diary and what a smartphone tells you about you, for example, what you monitor – if I monitor your smartphone for three months or only 2-3 days – I probably know more about you than you know about yourself, or what your closest confidants know about you. This means that nowadays we have the big problem that with the help of modern software solutions and technology, initially created for preventive or law enforcement purposes, it is possible to create a very comprehensive personality profile within seconds. I think it is obvious that this personality profile can be abused.

• § 13 Abs. 6 TMG – Grundsätzliche Möglichkeit der anonymen Nutzung von Internetdiensten
• Bundesverfassungsgerichtsentscheidung zur Online-Durchsuchung / Recht auf Gewährleistung der Integrität und Vertraulichkeit informationstechnischer Systeme
• Ende-zu-Ende Verschlüsselung
• Internationale Zusammenarbeit der Polizei (Überblick des Status Quo)
• Beitrag digitalcourage e.V. zu Verschlüsselungsverboten