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Comment by hexbin010 | Hacker News Reader

> There are already MANY laws in the EU and Germany for me regarding privacy

Which apply equally to the government?

Yeah, a lot of them apply explicitly to the government. In Germany at least most privacy laws flow from Article 10 of our constitution and for example Article 8 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. Both of which have been used in the past to explicitly remove laws that violated privacy in the name of security.

Germany is definitely a standout. I was taking issue with the blanket reference to the EU

The UK when it was in the EU for example had no problem basically doing whatever it liked, relying on exceptions for preventing crime and disorder. I'm sure there are other countries

Or like a sibling comment about Italy, who said that the government just ignores the privacy laws

Germany has a history of its government using data collected about citizens against them.

Much legislation was created after WWII to try to prevent that from happening again.

It hasn't stopped the German Interior Ministry from campaigning for EU-wide chat control and pushing to reinstate mass data retention

That's because this campaign is about changing that very law. Saying that "this is blatantly illegal" misses the basic point of this proposal being a CHANGE of the law that makes that illegal.

No, it's even worse. This is an attempt to bypass those laws by bringing in a new one at European level, and having that supersede the obnoxious protections in member states' Constitutions (Germany is hardly the only one with such protections).

If this passes, Germany would have to approve of it, which makes your diction a bit wierd.

A country approving a law at a higher instance that changes their existing law is not bypassing anything.

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