falklueke.com

Since you always need about 30 mins in Berlin to get from one place to another, I think the most important thing to have here is a nicely working mobile device. Public transports availability is very good in Berlin, even though you got to learn it when arriving here for the first stime. But it’s still missing one important feature of a 21st century capital: plugs for free.

Some minutes ago, the german federal court Bundesverfassungsgericht published a ruling on a complaint against a  law which was set up to provide the intelligence service of the state of Northrhine-Westphalia to so called “online searching”. Most of the badly conceptualized law was ruled to be incommensurate with the german constitution.

In Germany, many people awaited this leading decision. Even though it was just a ruling on a state law, it was clearly becoming a decision on how the police and intelligence have to deal with computer systems in general. The federal court ruled, that a new basic right is now to be respected by legislative and executive branches of the state: “a guarantee on integrity of information-based systems” is derived from and included in the personal rights.

The case which the Karlsruhe based court had to rule on now was just one in a series of rulings on the question, how laws for the internet age have to be designed and applicated. A lot of laws curtailing basic rights more or less like the european directive on data retention have to be ruled in the next months and several new ones will follow.

It will be a very huge discussion during the next days and weeks, to what extent todays ruling will affect the work of the parliament, the police and intelligence. Many people in Germany have started to watch what their politicians are doing in this very specific field of politics regarding the daily internet usage life. The expertise of politicians in the field of internet politics is still improvable, as the german minister of justice Brigitte Zypries (social democrats) was showing a few months ago in a now famous interview situation. A children reporter was asking about her online behaviours and she was answering: «What is this browser you are talking about?»