Berlin Approves New Expansion of Police Surveillance Powers

Maybe not under that term, but for example, almost the only place an American's 4th Amendment protections against search and seizure apply is in their home. Law enforcement can search their garbage at the curb, monitor their [edit: public] movements via camera and license plate monitoring, etc., look them up online, all without warrants [*]. They can't do that in someone's home.

[*] I'm pretty sure no warrant is required to search curbside trash or do most online research.

The controversial measures the article lists are things like:

> Police may now install state-developed spyware, known as trojans, on personal devices to intercept messages before or after encryption. If the software cannot be deployed remotely, the law authorizes officers to secretly enter a person’s home to gain access.

> The revised law also changes how police use body cameras. Paragraph 24c permits activation of bodycams inside private homes when officers believe there is a risk to life or limb.

Those seem like... pretty reasonable things for the police to do, presuming it has a warrant? And if the law authorizes doing these things without warrants, maybe the article should have lead with that?

Ctrl+F-ing "warrant" in the article doesn't give me any result, which makes me feel this article isn't very serious.

Maybe we were removing the proverbal fences all the time and are about to learn the hard way to put them back.

At village scales, authoritarianism is given more credence by the individual because ones life boundaries are reduced to the immediate environment, which is not really sustainable without structured hierarchy.

Incidentally, this is also a factor in why American’s adopt authoritarianism so rapidly as well - spending 3 hours of ones life in a bubble, on the freeway, commuting, is extremely damaging to ones psyche. Road-rage and neighbor hatred abound in such circumstances.

The solution to authoritarianism is travel beyond ones bounds. The roots of totalitarian-authoritarianism grow deeply in the desire to be free of the ‘filth of others’ - once you expand your horizons to embrace that ‘filth of others’, through travel and cultural interaction, that ‘filth of others’ becomes ‘the flavor of others’ instead.

This is easily demonstrated: talk to a German who has never left their home town/talk to a German who regularly visits vastly different parts of the world. You will see the authoritarian in the former, but the libertarian in the latter.

Germans seem to have a cultural thing going on where they think the way they do things is the most logical and correct way, and think they're doing everybody else a favor by telling them how things are meant to be done. In fairness, so do Americans. But, for instance, I never hear this shit from the French.

Life is a negotiation. What the populace brings to the table is they will vote harder next time or maybe a little bit of protests, but mostly just do what they're told and carry on with their jobs and pray things get better. What the government bring is fighter jets and guns and career civil servants who have had a lifetime of training how to fuck you, the might and wishes of the rich and powerful, and lording power by taxing you then redistributing it back as benefits that then feel depended upon.

If you enter the negotiating table with a sociopath and expect them not to steamroll you when you openly show you have far worse cards, then you're not thinking clearly. Insanity is thinking you can keep bringing the same things to the negotiation table and getting different results.

Whatever happens and however it resolves, there aren't a lot of options where they retain as much power as they have now for very long. (Even if the top people maintain control they're going to be cutting loose a lot of lower level elites because they'll have to because they won't be able to maintain their upkeep.) The wheel turns and we're in that phase where they're still in power, but have begun to feel their decline. Human psychology fears and feels loss much more keenly than gain and they both fear and feel a lot of loss of power underneath the veneer they maintain.

People saying eat the rich and posting guillotines and supporting socialist redistribution ideas use to be kind of edgy and fringe, but now it is gaining popular appeal again, and it makes people with wealth or political power scared.

For another we've definitely decided to not put effort into international law and instead run with a might-makes-right kind of ethics in international relations. One sign that this was the case was the US repeatedly perpetrating the crime of aggression in the early 2000s, another was the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno Karabakh/Artsakh in 2023, as well as ongoing genocidal and similar campaigns in e.g. Sudan, DR Congo and likely the Caribbean and/or South America in the future. Ukraine is yet another example. Currently China is probably the last major country to heavily prioritise money and trade over atrocities and tribute.

Then there's the future of technology. Software has been treading water since the seventies while at the same time promising to deliver some utopian revolution anytime now. Sometimes it's promised to war machines, like GOFAI often was, sometimes it's promised to the general public, usually it doesn't deliver outside of making either legal conflict (i.e. commerce, political participation and the like) or illegal conflict (i.e. mafia, non-parliamentary/autonomous political participation, and the like) and the state response more efficient and intense.

Some in power expect computers to replace labour on a massive scale sometime soon, in part because that's a promise that has been made. Some also expect computerised fake persons and marketing-adjacent technologies to finally make democratic ambitions impossible to realise. It's also expected that people will have to be kept in their place for other, more mundane reasons.

Climate protests, anti-genocide protests and so on show that people are still willing to put themselves in harms way for some ethical purpose and hope for a decent future. This is very scary if you're a contemporary world leader, because there is this harsh disconnect between the stories you tell yourself and others in a similar position about what you do and how you're perceived by your constituents. Basically they think they're doing their best and that's admirable, and the rest of us think they're shit and deserve to be harshly punished.

There's also the spectre of history. Once upon a time ordinary people took a lot of power for themselves, and sometimes they just murdered their leaders. Dragged them out on a town square and chopped their heads off, or shot them or beat them with bamboo until they died. When the conditions look like it might be time for revolution and you're the one holding the levers of power you get scared. The might-makes-right-states are also scary, because those that haven't made the jump already don't have a bloc that backs them up, unlike the socialist states and the capitalist ones and the third world collective did way back when.

So, we're in a hurry to figure out how to make sure local populations cannot revolt, and next up is to figure out whether there are actually any allies or whether this is a war of all against all.

Even small steps to delay it like in France lead to near open revolt.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A4nderfinanzausgleich

Secret access to plant bugs is how the FBI beat the mafia in the US in many cases in the 80s and 90s. But there were strict rules.

Even more important: The cost of surveillance this way is very high. It's not practical to perform massive surveillance this way, so it requires a reason for targeted surveillance.