ABSTRACT
Census case which produced "informational self-determination" remains the landmark example18 the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe has striven to outdo itself in 2008. Firstly, in February, it virtually established a new right to on-line privacy. 'The German Constitutional Court ruled that a surveillance law passed in 2007 in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia gave police and state officials too much power to spy on citizens using "trojan horse" software, which can be delivered by e-mail and used to scan the contents of a hard drive. Not only did the law violate the right to privacy, the court said, but it also violated a basic right for a citizen using a computer with an Internet connection to "a guarantee of confidentiality and integrity in informationtechnology systems."19 Then, within a month, in March 2008, it struck the first major blow against the EU Data Retention Directive. "After 30,000 Germans filed a classaction suit, Germany's constitutional court in Karlsruhe blocked large parts of a new data-collection bill lawmakers say will help stop terror attacks... The law gave the federal government broad access to stored telephone and Internet data — including email addresses, length of call and numbers dialled — for a six-month period. In the case of cell phone calls, service providers could potentially save data on the location calls were made from. The law went into effect in January 2008. But in March the German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe issued an injunction against it, declaring parts of the law unconstitutional pending further review".20
