Berlin Approves New Expansion of Police Surveillance Powers

> the "inviolability of the home" human dignity concept doesn't exist in the US.

Maybe not under that term, but for example, almost the only place an American's 4th Amendment protections against search and seizure apply is in their home. Law enforcement can search their garbage at the curb, monitor their movements via camera and license plate monitoring, etc., look them up online, all without warrants []. They can't do that in someone's home.

[] I'm pretty sure no warrant is required to search curbside trash or do most online research.

Calling it "German authoritarianism" risks thinking it's a localized phenomenon or special case. But it seems more like a regression to the global mean. Most of these expansions are things that have been on the front page of HN, but in reference to the US: cell tower queries, facial recognition, license plate harvesting, long detention periods without being charged, etc.

Germans love rules and hate those who don’t (source: scolded by several Germans while travelling there)

In a nutshell, the sovereign debt crisis. If you don't realize there's a sovereign debt crisis (ongoing across years), or even more accurately, a wide variety of sovereign debt crises, or even more accurately, a wide variety of debt crises of both sovereign and private entities, well, your governments and some of the more government-adjacent private entities have bent a lot of resources into make sure that's the case and convincing that it's just peachy when they borrow money, if not outright a boon, without regard to how much they borrow or how much they've already borrowed. They may have convinced you that this is true, but they know better.

Whatever happens and however it resolves, there aren't a lot of options where they retain as much power as they have now for very long. (Even if the top people maintain control they're going to be cutting loose a lot of lower level elites because they'll have to because they won't be able to maintain their upkeep.) The wheel turns and we're in that phase where they're still in power, but have begun to feel their decline. Human psychology fears and feels loss much more keenly than gain and they both fear and feel a lot of loss of power underneath the veneer they maintain.

European governments anxious yet refuse switch to wartime production...

Can't imagine why they'd be anxious.

Life is a negotiation. What the populace brings to the table is they will vote harder next time or maybe a little bit of protests, but mostly just do what they're told and carry on with their jobs and pray things get better. What the government bring is fighter jets and guns and career civil servants who have had a lifetime of training how to fuck you, the might and wishes of the rich and powerful, and lording power by taxing you then redistributing it back as benefits that then feel depended upon.

If you enter the negotiating table with a sociopath and expect them not to steamroll you when you openly show you have far worse cards, then you're not thinking clearly. Insanity is thinking you can keep bringing the same things to the negotiation table and getting different results.

There is an alternative explaination that you will not like.

Maybe we were removing the proverbal fences all the time and are about to learn the hard way to put them back.

Classical liberalism is a rare blip of an exception in the history of civilization. As Milton Friedman says, and I paraphrase, it's quite remarkable it happened in the first place, but there's no real guarantee those conditions might ever arise again and no real expectation that it's realistic to think it will be recreated again in any particular desired timespan.

we ought to stop these decadent crooks from plunging us into fascism and war just to rescue their waning privilege (again), but somehow i don't think we will. so, yeah, lessons to be relearned ahead.

And as always, plenty of oil runs down that slope to make it slippery. First it's terrorists, then heavy crime, then petty crime, then small things, then it's whoever the powers that be don't deem deserving of freedom. We've been down that road on Germany, but history rhymes, as the saying goes.

The big shift is that law enforcement now has to do their job, instead of trying to make tech companies do their job.

Even more important: The cost of surveillance this way is very high. It's not practical to perform massive surveillance this way, so it requires a reason for targeted surveillance.

What are you calling "extremist terrorism"?

Yes. Who decides? Can the police just decide at will? Do they need a warrant?

Secret access to plant bugs is how the FBI beat the mafia in the US in many cases in the 80s and 90s. But there were strict rules.