At the beginning of October, the Federal Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser, recently launched a draft amendment to the Constitution Protection Act. This is intended to give political intelligence agents even greater powers. For example, they would be allowed to denounce people considered to be “extremists” in their private environment.
As regulated in Section 19 of the German Constitution Protection Act, the secret service is currently (at least officially) only allowed to pass on personal data to private individuals if permission has been granted by the Ministry of the Interior, insofar as this is deemed necessary “to protect the free democratic basic order, the existence or security of the federal government or a state or to ensure the security of vital or defense facilities”. In principle, this only applies to special situations in the area of so-called “most serious criminal offenses”.
Faeser’s new draft law is now set to change this. According this, the political police agents will not only be able to pass on the private data of people under surveillance much more easily, they will also be able to denounce them completely arbitrarily anywhere in their environment at their own discretion. This is set out in paragraph 20 of the new draft, which deals with the transfer of data to domestic places; “domestic places” refers to natural and legal persons who have their place of residence in Germany.
Among other things, in the draft law states as a prerequisite that the data transfer serves to: “Persons who are involved in the endeavors or activities,
a) to deradicalize or
b) to restrict their aspirations or activities by means of risk-related measures and the organization and monitoring of the penal system and supervision of conduct…”
This means that the secret service has legal permission to inform anyone who knows a person under surveillance about the person’s so-called “extremist aspirations”. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether they are work colleagues, friends, neighbors or romantic relationships. The political secret service should be able to smear you everywhere and denounce you for your political opinions in your environment. The political police can even inform your employer or landlord about your “extremist views” to make life difficult for you. If a politically active person has difficulties finding an apartment or a job in the future, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution could be behind this. Another important aspect, however, is that this makes it much easier for the intelligent service to obtain information, as they can try to squeeze people from their target’s environment anywhere and turn them into informants.
Of course, when it comes to laws, especially those of secret services, there is always the question of the extent to which the laws are actually adhered to. Even if certain things were not legally permitted in the past, it can still be assumed that the political police occasionally exceeds its own powers and does these things anyway. However, the fact that this draft law is now on the table means that those in power are planning to create a massive climate of denunciation and spying on all political dissenters. In other words, exactly what the same people have repeatedly condemned with crocodile tears about the Stasi in the east german “GDR”
It is also striking that the bourgeois media have barely reported on this planned change in the law so far. Apart from an article in “Süddeutsche Zeitung” and “Bild Zeitung”, there are actually only a few isolated articles from smaller news portals. However, the planned change in the law involves very significant extensions to the powers of the secret service and was not approved by everyone in parliament without objection. While all the media are eagerly reproducing the same propaganda against the Palestinian people’s national liberation struggle, those in power can simply introduce such changes to the law without a public outcry. How else could it be, when nobody knows this?
The legal draft mentioned in this article is part of a big tendency of German imperialism to expand its apparatus of repression and to trample on the achieved democratic rights of the masses in an even more reactionary way. However hard the rulers try, they will not succeed in stifling the resistance of the oppressed with repression and spying.
