surveillance

While the media focuse on the Kremlin’s “hybrid warfare” against the Western democracies or the Chinese social credit system controlling people’s everyday life through mass-surveillance, the illiberal state of Viktor Orbán is also doing its fair share to exercise information control via new digital powers.

This was not how Edward Snowden imagined the effects of his disclosures playing out. With this law, the German government is legitimising years of illegal surveillance by the federal intelligence services (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND). And the Bundestag, with its eyes open, is passing a law that is clearly unconstitutional.