The explanation is deceptively unclear, IMO. What's being authorized is court-ordered searches of a type that were previously prohibited, even for courts to authorize, by strict privacy laws. The US has always had the power to conduct these searches [0]; the "inviolability of the home" human dignity concept doesn't exist in the US. (I'll defer to German people to explain this concept).
As explained in heise.de[1] (in German) about a parallel law being enacted in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern,
> "For the online search, the deputies now also grant the law enforcement the right to secretly enter and search apartments with judicial permission."
> the "inviolability of the home" human dignity concept doesn't exist in the US.
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.
Is this even practical anymore? A non-technical person can set up video surveillance on their home for a couple hundred bucks. Why wouldn't a criminal do that? I think the days of the FBI planting a microphone in a lamp on Tony Soprano's basement are over.
It's hard to set up video surveillance in your home without inadvertently providing much of the surveillance data the law enforcement officers were after, especially for non-technical people.
I think the "inviolability" thing is useful just to understand what's actually happening here, but it's also important to understand that the US and Germany have very different criminal justice, search, and evidentiary systems. Germany doesn't have an exclusionary rule for evidence, for instance.
The boundaries of your "home" varies by State. For example, in some States the interior of your car is part of your home even when not at home, which occasionally has entertaining implications.
This article is not about warrantless searches of homes, though. In America, courts can and do order the police to secretly enter a domicile and install surveillance devices.
It's so frustrating that every other comment in this thread is people giving their pet opinion about the headline and what it means about the state of the world / the inherent authoritarianism of Germany / whatever, and nobody else is commenting on the contents.
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.
Sounds like horrible overreach to me, even if such activities are legal in America (when did American police become the gold standard that Europe needs to emulate???!!)
Seriously, searching your home with a warrant is one thing. Doing it secretly without the homeowner knowing about it afterwards is some Stasi shit. Are they going to steal your dirty underwear too? And installing malware on the computers of people merely suspected of a crime is even more insane.
> And installing malware on the computers of people merely suspected of a crime is even more insane.
But it's not "merely suspected"! It's "suspected with enough evidence to convince a judge to issue the warrant". These are completely different things, and to intentionally confound the two is wildly disingenuous.
I don't see how that's much better; a judge is just one guy and he's only hearing the cops' side of the story since you aren't allowed to know you've been accused, let alone present your side of the story.
I mean... yes, that's how police surveillance works? People don't want to do illegal things when they know the police is watching, so sometimes the police has to spy on people before they can prove they did something illegal. The person being spied on can't present their side of the story, because if you tell them they're being investigated, they'll just lay low.
So yeah, there's always the possibility that the cops spy on someone innocent or try to dig up dirt on a journalist or something, and that's why warrants exist. If you don't think a judge's oversight is enough for the police to intrude on someone's privacy, then you're basically saying that the police should only ever have access to OSINT sources and nothing more.
> "Whenever a high energy photon strikes the CZT, it mobilises an electron and this electrical signal can be used to make an image. Earlier scanner technology used a two-step process, which was not as precise."
I understand the unnamed alternative is the scintillation-type detector, where high-energy photons induce fluorescence, emitting secondary photons of lower energy. Detecting the secondary photons (converting them to electrons) is the second step.
(IANAL) That demonstrates the opposite: that's a voluntary system with no force of law behind it—the private sector "self-regulating" itself, if you will.
The film rating systems were created under threat of legislation in the first half of the 20th century (so, in lieu of actual legislation). The transformative 1st Amendment rulings of the Warren Court would have made such laws unconstitutional after the 1960's, but the dynamic that created these codes predates that—predates the modern judicial interpretation of the 1st Amendment.
Pretty sure many of Meta's tech workers are furious about these actions, as they were in the previous story where 404media published a number of employee comments:
WhatsApp is a fact of life in locales like Europe, India and Indonesia. There is literally no avoiding it if you want to have a job or function in society.
I don't use Meta products, and haven't for many years. But I still have a Facebook account, because a) deleting it would be a fairly rigorous process, and b) as long as I maintain the account, I have some control over the information about me that Meta maintains; if I deleted the account, they would maintain a "shadow profile" for me that I had no control over, and (for instance) any photos tagged as containing me, I would not be able to go in and untag.
> It’s even easier to delete your WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook accounts.
Unfortunately, it's not, at least for Whatsapp.
That's a part of the issue - as there is no open access federation requirement, there are messenger islands. Whatsapp for the non-tech folks, Telegram for those who either are wary of Meta, want gambling, or a service decidedly not affiliated with the American judicial sphere, Signal and Threema for the utter nerds/journalists/activists, iMessage for the Apple crowd, or the now-defunct rich bro network of Blackberry. SMS, MMS or its replacement RCS that the carriers are trying (and failing) to push, I don't even count these given how faded to irrelevance they all are. Oh, and then there are (particularly in the Asian market) all the country specific "everything in one"-apps that Musk tried and failed to convert X to.
And particularly among the non-tech folks, no way to get them to use anything but Whatsapp. Network effects are a thing, hence the EU's push to break up the walled gardens at least a tiny tiny bit, but it will take years until it's implemented.
Ok sure, delete Instagram and Facebook then. That seems easier to start, no?
But you're assuming these messaging apps are something we need and have to have and then solving backward from there.
While I certainly recognize that a society may have made the mistake of going all-in on a proprietary app in order to participate in society (whoops!), I can tell you for a fact that it's not required for any given society to function because I don't have any of these apps and just use SMS and e-mail and I am able to work, coordinate events with friends, make dinner reservations, and send funny videos. I can also vouch for the United States, specifically that such apps aren't required.
So we can clearly separate out that we don't need these apps to function as a society - we can go back to the question of morality. In the US if you are "against" Meta or Mark Zuckerberg or whatever, you can just delete the apps because you don't need them.
> "The government of Guyana — which borders Venezuela — said in a statement Wednesday the ship was falsely flying the Guyanese flag, despite not being registered in the South American country"
The US pressures countries to deregister ships on US sanctions lists. The ship had previously been registered in Panama.
It feels a little sketchy to force countries to deregister ships in order to seize them, but they could have flown Venezuela's flag instead of taking the risk of being stateless instead.
Further context: it's owned by a sanctioned Russian oligarch,
> "The ship — known as Adisa in 2022 — is among the vessels controlled by sanctioned Russian oil magnate Viktor Artemov, the Treasury said in a statement[...] The tanker is controlled by Nigeria-based management company Thomarose Global Ventures LTD and owned by a firm linked to Artemov, according to publicly available data."
There's no right to entry at US borders; you can be arbitrarily refused (or much worse) for any subjective suspicion.
(And you are misled by assumptions of privilege, any readers who think this could never happen to you. Your social non-conformity (rejection of social media) is quirky and geeky and completely harmless; and surely the nice government man will understand this).
As explained in heise.de[1] (in German) about a parallel law being enacted in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern,
> "For the online search, the deputies now also grant the law enforcement the right to secretly enter and search apartments with judicial permission."
[0] e.g. https://www.npr.org/2011/08/02/138916011/home-visits-and-oth... ("Home Visits And Other 'Secrets Of The FBI'")
[1] https://www.heise.de/news/Mecklenburg-Vorpommern-Durchsuchun...
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