Jungdemokraten / Junge Linke (A left wing political youth organization that is not officially related to a political party in germany) started a project called Safer Privacy. As part of the project Constanze Kurz (Chaos Computer Club – CCC) and Jan Schallaböck (Datenschutzzentrum Schleswig-Holstein) were invited to talk about the state of affairs in privacy. The topic has been discussed extensively in recent media art festivals and other gatherings of that kind, but the mainstream public discussion is somewhat behind. According to Constance Kurz, CCC has identified hype and panic creation as an important tool used by the political forces whose agenda it is to implement new security and surveillance technologies. Despite being very critical of this kind of media manipulation, CCC is considering applying similar strategies to fight the erosion of privacy. Kurz also pointed out that security technologies and laws that get implemented often do not improve the security situation at all or address problems that hardly exist. Scientific research proving this is, according to Kurz, often held back until laws have passed parliament.
Schallaböck and Kurz are of course both very concerned about the erosion of privacy and their disagreements are mostly minor differences in terminilogy. It is however very interesting to look at it from a slightly different angle:
Kurz is a techie and Schallböck a jurist. Kurz complained a couple of times how hard it was for her to read court decisions concerning the topic. However, technology today is to a large extend software, hence written in programming languages, which just like judicial texts and laws need to be unambiguous above all. Which is why both are so hard to read for non experts. When thinking about it in these lines one quickly sees that there are more parallels between both systems. Just like agreeing on technological standards, it is often hard to form laws that comply with existing laws and in both areas economical interests of powerful players often lead to sub-optimal solutions. Schallböck explained that certain laws which can be expected to not comply with the german constitution and therefore wont pass Bundesverfassungsgericht (the highest german court) get done as european directive instead. In that case Bundesverfassungsgericht is not cognizant. The same practice exists in other european countries.
Someone from the audience pointed out quite aptly that relying on Bundesverfassungsgericht instead of the political system when it comes to protecting privacy, will always lead to bad solutions: Laws that compromise privacy as much as is possible within the frame of the constitution. Is this what we really want?