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Comment by maweki | Hacker News Reader

In Germany the "Funkzellenabfrage" ("reverse location" request by cell) provided by the providers is used quite often. On the last Chaos Communication Congress there was a talk about this and the police uses it quite frequently.

The guesses were that on average every german phone is identified multiple times per year during this procedure. According to the Berlin statistics from 2017 there were nearly 450 requests resulting is 60 Million returned phones. Just compare that to Berlin's population...

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of all places you would Germany is the country the most aware of the dangers of broad surveillance powers. Strange that police gets such a blank check...

Does Germany not have judicial review of these kinds of police requests?

As far as I understand, every request has to be done with judicial approval, which is given every time since there's no mechanism to check for effectiveness after the fact and most judges have no clue how broad the request might be (and the police will certainly not dwell on that fact).

So the opposite of a blank check.

"Approved every time without knowing how big and having no review process." is exactly like a blank check.

You seem to be implying that needing to go get blank checks with no meaningful questions asked makes something not a blank check. But that's exactly how checks work. They're pieces of paper after all. This situation is more like blank checks than if they had 24/7 access to the entire database.

It's always a constant struggle, just like Internet censorship [0]. Politics usually sell it with the "It's only used against terrorists and pedophiles!" angle, while police actually end up mostly using it in drug-related cases.

But it should also be noted that the US had its fair share of influence in eroding the actual application of privacy laws in Germany, by pressuring Germany to modify its G-10 law to appease the NSA [1].

People need to remember that the German BND (German intelligence agency), traces its roots straight back to the Gehlen Organization [2], which was established in alliance with the CIA after the end of WWII.

It's this old shared-history that allows the BND and NSA to work as closely as they do, to this day, bypassing privacy protections of the German Grundgesetz trough designed loopholes and secret agreements.

Case in point: According to German law it was completely legal for the NSA to listen in on Angela Merkel's phone calls [3].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zugangserschwerungsgesetz

[1] http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/20140... (Page 3)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gehlen_Organization

[3] https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2013-10/nsa-uerberwa...

"Funkzellenabfrage" - That's a great word. Is there a word describing the ability of the German language to condense English phrases into a single word? :)

I think this would come under "agglutination"[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutination

German is considered an inflective language, because it uses just one suffix for words, and that suffix has many-many variants to express the required grammatical meaning (singular/plural, modality, subject/object, dative/accusative, genitive, etc.)

Agglutinative languages just jam everything after the word in small morphemes. (And some, just to be sure, has a few variants of each of those, to match vowel kinds and such.)

One of my favorites was "Vorlesungsverzeichnis" (lecture directory/course catalog).

Vorlesung = lecture

- Lesung = a reading (like a book reading)/lesson

- add "Vor" ("before" as in "in front of [a group]") and it becomes Lecture

Verzeichnis = directory

- Zeichnis = symbol, signal, reference, sign

- add "Ver" (hard to really explain what it does) and it becomes directory, index, register, list

Bandwurmwort (https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Bandwurmwort)

"tapeworm word" in English.

Basically, they are compound words.

The literal translation is just "radio cell query". But it's a very catchy word :D

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