BERLIN, April 22 (UPI) -- Germany fears its government is trying to turn the country into a Big Brother state for the sake of more efficient anti-terror operations.

At least the police are happy: Investigations are "much easier with the new methods," a spokesman for Germany's Federal Criminal Office, or BKA, said last week.

Germany's Interior and Justice ministries last week struck a deal on a set of new provisions regarding the fight against serious crime and terrorism; the anti-terror update, pushed by Germany's top security official Wolfgang Schaeuble, the interior minister, would allow police to not only wiretap suspects' apartments, but also install mini-cameras that secretly videotape what happens inside an apartment. The wiretapping of private conversations is also to be allowed, Schaeuble said. Listening in on private conversations is illegal; prosecutors have to shut off their recording machines once conversations touch the private realm; police have long complained that this makes efficient surveillance impossible.

The new provision would also allow the surveillance of an innocent person's home if suspects visit there. Add to that the possibility of installing spy software on a suspect's personal computer, and you have the key elements of the new BKA law that has most lawmakers in Germany fuming.

"The measures that are to be legalized here remind me of states that are not democracies," Renate Kuenast, the head of the German Green Party, told Monday's Berliner Zeitung newspaper. She said people should be worried "about civil rights in Germany."