Analysis: German Big Brother bill bashed

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."

Kuenast had already bashed the provisions last week, adding her party will oppose the bill once it gets to Parliament.

"Schaeuble wants to construct a security state where everyone is a potential criminal," she said last week.

Erhart Koerting, Berlin's interior minister, told German news magazine Der Spiegel he was against the visual surveillance measures included in the bill. Such measures would probably not make it past Germany's highest court, the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, observers say.

The court in the past years has been the biggest hurdle for Berlin's anti-terror plans, with several anti-terror moves being thwarted by judges who argued that they undermine people's basic rights. Experts expect similar reactions once the law is challenged.

"I can't imagine that this law holds up in its current form before the Constitutional Court," Ulrich Battis, a Berlin-based law expert, told the Berliner Zeitung.

And then, of course, there is Germany's Parliament. Expect most opposition lawmakers to block the bill if the German government refuses to weaken some of its key parts.

That likely won't go down well with Germany's conservative politicians: Erwin Huber, one of the heads of the conservatives in Bavaria, wants the bill to include the possibility for federal investigators to secretly enter a suspect's home and install spy software on his or her computer.

Entering a suspect's home is "absolutely necessary" to fight serious crime and terrorism, Huber said last week.

Germany's Cabinet will pass the security bill by July or August, officials said. It will then move to Parliament, probably in October or November, where lawmakers have to sign off on it.

Germany has so far been spared of a terrorist attack, but officials on repeated occasions arrested people accused of having plotted major bombings.