Dialog in the Museum

What is the current situation regarding state surveillance in Germany? To what extent do the authorities access our personal data today? In 2024, the Federal Ministries of Justice, the Interior, and Home Affairs under the then Red-Yellow-Green (“traffic-light”) coalition commissioned the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law (MPI-CSL) in Freiburg with a research project on these and other questions. The legal scholar Prof. Dr. Ralf Poscher, Head of the Department of Public Law at the MPI-CSL, presented the findings from this study, which scientifically evaluated selected surveillance powers entrusted to the security and law enforcement authorities.

To gain a systematic overview of all surveillance measures by the security authorities, Poscher proceeded in six steps. First, the data sources were identified and systematized according to aspects of everyday life such as social media, finance, and communication (1). This was followed by a constitutional analysis of the surveillance powers that allow access to these sources (2). The authorities with power of access include the risk prevention authorities (Federal Criminal Police Office, Federal Police, state police authorities), public prosecutors, intelligence services, customs authorities, and the Central Office for Financial Transaction Investigations.

Poscher’s team also examined how intensively these surveillance measures intervene in citizens’ rights and how often they are deployed (3, 4). “After evaluating the intensity and frequency of the interventions, we obtained a surveillance value for each individual regulation,” Poscher explained the 5th step. Finally, all the individual values were then combined into the surveillance barometer (6). This reveals differences between the areas of application, for example in terms of which authorities exercise surveillance to a greater or lesser extent.

The surveillance barometer is an instrument of transparency not only for security authorities, but ultimately for all citizens, Poscher stated. “If we want to become a genuinely resilient society in matters of security, we must also develop a democratic security culture and a democratic understanding of security,” he pleaded in conclusion. The police will then not be the opposition, but a part of us. “We should be allowed to know what the police do, as long as this does not impair their operational capabilities. And our surveillance barometer project also ultimately serves this larger societal dimension.”