ABSTRACT
Privacy matters. The need for privacy protection is evident. This is so not only with a view to state authorities’ activities – which can deeply invade the private sphere as two cases before the Bundesverfassungsgericht, the German Federal Constitutional Court, show. One of these concerns the powers of the Verfassungsschutzbehörde, the authority for protection of the constitution, of the German constituent state of North-Rhine Westfalia to collect data by secretly infiltrating computers (‘online searches’).1 In the other case the Bundesverfassungsgericht declared certain new provisions of the Federal Telecommunications Act (Telekommunikationsgesetz – TKG) nul and void. These require suppliers of telecommunications services to store, for a period of six months, specific traffic and locations data. These data are created when mobile and landline telephones, email and internet are used so that they may be retrieved for the purposes of criminal prosecution, the warding off of substantial dangers to public security and the performance of intelligence tasks.2
