Europe on very bad tracks : The plan for a German “Patriot Act” has just been revealed

Clandestine entries into homes, hacking, spyware: Germany wants to extend police powers

Source : https://essentiel.news/projet-patriot-act-allemand-revele/

Article by Icaros from Essentiel News:

Currently, searches are only permitted in Germany if law enforcement explicitly informs the person concerned of the concrete suspicions against them and the purpose of the search. According to exclusive revelations from the newspaper Spiegel, this is about to change.

Secret searches

Article 13 of the German Constitution, which protects the inviolability of the home, can currently only be violated in cases of “imminent danger.” The newly revealed bill would render the article in question essentially obsolete, by significantly expanding the powers of the police: it would allow them to secretly enter people's homes, as well as hack into computers, phones cell phones, and monitor communications.

Thus, the new German bill can be compared to the American “Patriot Act” , named after this anti-terrorism law which followed the September 11 attacks and which greatly expanded the power of the executive.

Following Spiegel's revelations, the German Liberal Democratic Party (FDP) was critical: according to a party official cited by the newspaper, such interference in rights should not be undertaken "lightly", and if the law allows too far-reaching interventions, “the rule of law would be abolished”. This official added, however, that the authorities still “need appropriate and powerful investigative tools.”

Asked by Spiegel, a spokesperson for the German Interior Ministry initially refused to answer, before asserting that the law is intended to thwart so-called "Islamist terrorism."

False flag terrorism

We recall that “terrorism” in the West was, during the Cold War, perpetrated under false flags by the Western services themselves, within the framework of Operation Gladio . When he was a researcher at the Zurich Polytechnic, historian Daniele Ganser chronicled these crimes in his book The Secret Armies of NATO (2004).

The Bologna attack in particular, which killed 85 people on August 2, 1980 and injured 200, was allegedly perpetrated by the Italian secret services in complicity with the P2 Masonic lodge, with the aim of accusing far-left factions. .

These practices probably did not stop after the Cold War. After the 1995 attack on the RER in Paris, for example, strong suspicions had weighed on the Algerian secret services, whose role in the attacks would have been covered up by the French government, so as to justify a renewal of the fight against Algerian opposition.

Another reference example of course concerns the attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington, immediately attributed to Islamic terrorists, and which caused strong questions; on the 15th anniversary of the attacks, an opinion poll revealed, for example, that a majority of French people no longer entirely subscribed to the conspiracy theory promulgated by the American government, according to which acrobatic pilots had pulverized three steel skyscrapers with two aluminum planes (not without having thrown their passport out of the cockpit a few fractions of a second before). Globally, at least a quarter of people do not subscribe to this idea.

Anti-terrorism and repression of expression

The skepticism seems all the more well-founded since the political power does not hesitate, at least since the September 11 attacks and the entry into force of laws similar to the one Germany is considering today, to repress free expression. and political opposition under the pretext of acting against terrorism. The United States government, whose USA Patriot Act has served as a model for the entire world, has notoriously used its so-called anti-terrorism laws to attack the individual freedoms of Americans.

Governments around the world also use their anti-terrorism laws to target environmental activists, to undermine human rights, or to muzzle their opposition.

In Germany in particular, the German authorities have already designated as "terrorist" the Reichsbürger movement, which defends the idea of ​​a sovereign Germany, does not consider the regime in power to be legitimate, and which opposes the excesses of globalization. This same vocabulary has also already been used to defend the banning of the AfD party, the leading political force in the former East Germany and the second largest party in Germany.

A global trend

The German “Patriot Act” is not yet in force, but if global trends are to be believed, it is highly likely that it will be adopted. Indeed, Germany is behind its neighbors: in France for example, the “law strengthening internal security and the fight against terrorism” , the “law aiming to secure and regulate the digital space” or even the “ law tending to strengthen the prevention and repression of sectarian movements” are all legislative measures already widely assimilated to a “French Patriot Act.”

Despite everything, it has already raised a few rare protests. Mika Beuster, president of the Association of German Journalists quoted by Spiegel , criticized the bill, fearing that "all journalists carrying out research in security-related areas would be affected."