The explanation is deceptively unclear, IMO. What's being authorized is court-ordered searches of a type that were previously prohibited, even for courts to authorize, by strict privacy laws. The US has always had the power to conduct these searches [0]; the "inviolability of the home" human dignity concept doesn't exist in the US. (I'll defer to German people to explain this concept).
As explained in heise.de[1] (in German) about a parallel law being enacted in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern,
> "For the online search, the deputies now also grant the law enforcement the right to secretly enter and search apartments with judicial permission."
> 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 [edit: public] 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.
I think the "inviolability" thing is useful just to understand what's actually happening here, but it's also important to understand that the US and Germany have very different criminal justice, search, and evidentiary systems. Germany doesn't have an exclusionary rule for evidence, for instance.
The boundaries of your "home" varies by State. For example, in some States the interior of your car is part of your home even when not at home, which occasionally has entertaining implications.
Is this even practical anymore? A non-technical person can set up video surveillance on their home for a couple hundred bucks. Why wouldn't a criminal do that? I think the days of the FBI planting a microphone in a lamp on Tony Soprano's basement are over.
It's hard to set up video surveillance in your home without inadvertently providing much of the surveillance data the law enforcement officers were after, especially for non-technical people.
This article is not about warrantless searches of homes, though. In America, courts can and do order the police to secretly enter a domicile and install surveillance devices.
It's so frustrating that every other comment in this thread is people giving their pet opinion about the headline and what it means about the state of the world / the inherent authoritarianism of Germany / whatever, and nobody else is commenting on the contents.
The controversial measures the article lists are things like:
> Police may now install state-developed spyware, known as trojans, on personal devices to intercept messages before or after encryption. If the software cannot be deployed remotely, the law authorizes officers to secretly enter a person’s home to gain access.
> The revised law also changes how police use body cameras. Paragraph 24c permits activation of bodycams inside private homes when officers believe there is a risk to life or limb.
Those seem like... pretty reasonable things for the police to do, presuming it has a warrant? And if the law authorizes doing these things without warrants, maybe the article should have lead with that?
Ctrl+F-ing "warrant" in the article doesn't give me any result, which makes me feel this article isn't very serious.
Sounds like horrible overreach to me, even if such activities are legal in America (when did American police become the gold standard that Europe needs to emulate???!!)
Seriously, searching your home with a warrant is one thing. Doing it secretly without the homeowner knowing about it afterwards is some Stasi shit. Are they going to steal your dirty underwear too? And installing malware on the computers of people merely suspected of a crime is even more insane.
> And installing malware on the computers of people merely suspected of a crime is even more insane.
But it's not "merely suspected"! It's "suspected with enough evidence to convince a judge to issue the warrant". These are completely different things, and to intentionally confound the two is wildly disingenuous.
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.
>Calling it "German authoritarianism" risks thinking it's a localized phenomenon or special case.
It very much is though. Plenty of other countries in EU like France or Romania for example but probably many more, don't have even remotely as many authoritarian and invasive BS laws as Germany does.
But the worst part is that Germans have gaslit themselves to think that their authoritarian laws are there "for their own protection". They don't even realize they have a problem, until they move and live abroad and learn you can run a country without your government have so many surveillance and speech control powers over what you can do or say in public about their leaders.
I don't really care what some arbitrary number on Wikipedia tells me about the freedom of a country I know quite well, as long as I am unable to insult my political leaders on the internet for their fuckups or say that 'Israel is an apartheid state committing genocide', without police later knocking on my door to arrest me for "hate speech" or "far right extremism", I consider the freedom score of that country to be ZERO. This is mostly a UK, Germany and Austria exclusive issue in the EU-zone and not an EU widespread issue quite yet, but boy they sure are trying to get everyone at that same level.
Any scientist will tell you to not to look at the end data, but to look at the formula used to calculate the result and the way in which the data for the study was gathered. That's what's most important.
Depending on what your formula and data is, you can get to any arbitrary result you want, which is how scientists also had studies in the 1950s saying that smoking was good for your health.
The number of people, including scientists, who treat algorithms as black boxes is incredibly concerning. The math is meaningless without interpretation, and that requires understanding what goes into the scores.
That said, why would anyone think such scores could be a reasonably accurate representation? You are aggregating such complex situations and with that you kill off nuance. It doesn't mean the scores are useless, but need to be used carefully. I mean even look at the chart and you'll see weird things pop out. Ireland is ranked 5th by the "Freedom in the World" Index and falls into the highest binning for all 3 categories: economic freedom, press freedom, democracy. Yet New Zealand is 3rd, falling into the second bins for economic and press freedom. Further down you see the US below Argentina yet the US's scores are significantly higher than Argentina in each other category and the US is tied with Mongolia (who has a major problem with Press Freedom).
It should be quite clear that these scores are missing a lot of important details. Like the US definitely has problems with Freedom of Speech (and growing) but you can call Trump and Clinton pedos on the internet all day and nothing will happen to you[0]. Nuance is needed and treating these indexes as black boxes is just harmful to a conversation about freedom.
In my opinion its: Village life. Germany is a state of small villages/towns/cities/city-states, interconnected with fairly productive lines of communication - but it is very easy to live ones entire life in a German village and never leave.
At village scales, authoritarianism is given more credence by the individual because ones life boundaries are reduced to the immediate environment, which is not really sustainable without structured hierarchy.
Incidentally, this is also a factor in why American’s adopt authoritarianism so rapidly as well - spending 3 hours of ones life in a bubble, on the freeway, commuting, is extremely damaging to ones psyche. Road-rage and neighbor hatred abound in such circumstances.
The solution to authoritarianism is travel beyond ones bounds. The roots of totalitarian-authoritarianism grow deeply in the desire to be free of the ‘filth of others’ - once you expand your horizons to embrace that ‘filth of others’, through travel and cultural interaction, that ‘filth of others’ becomes ‘the flavor of others’ instead.
This is easily demonstrated: talk to a German who has never left their home town/talk to a German who regularly visits vastly different parts of the world. You will see the authoritarian in the former, but the libertarian in the latter.
Libertarian is not always better. A Goldilocks position is the best. Change is okay but you must first understand why boundaries and norms were created (Chesterton's fence). Extremely tolerant people also allow authoritarian cultures to settle, create enclaves and outnumber their own culture which is a bit of an own goal.
The “filth of others” can be described in as many ways as a human might use to justify their elevation of one tribe over the degradation of another.
Look at it critically - whenever you encounter a totalitarian-authoritarian personality bloviating about “those people over there” (others), its usually based on the totalitarian mechanism of ‘avoiding affinity with attributes considered unsavoury’ (filth).
This concept has other applications. If you have two villages, separated perhaps by a near-insurmountable mountain or lake, or if one of those villages raises cows while the other raises goats - this is usually the basis of the formation of a new dialect, accent, or indeed entirely new language. However, when civilization occurs and those two villages merge into a broader community, that language changes to become a unity.
This is observable at an individual level, too. Any unacknowledged or under-recognized similarities/identities/differences between two or more entities will inevitably be used to justify segregation of those entities. The solution, as always, is to identify similarities/identities/differences in a cohesive manner - this is anathema to the totalitarian-authoritarian personality, who is usually pretty stubborn about enforcing, in totality, those under-acknowledged facets.
The underlying reason is a lack of cultural fluidity, or in other words, an over-abundance of cultural rigidity, which manifests as a desire to be free of other cultures.
The most effective antidote to totalitarian-authoritarianism is a one-way ticket to somewhere distant.
German villages, as comfortable as they are, don’t really promote this antidote.
Have you ever noticed how often Germans online like to say "That's not how we do it in Germany...""We don't do that in Germany...""In Germany we..." ?
Germans seem to have a cultural thing going on where they think the way they do things is the most logical and correct way, and think they're doing everybody else a favor by telling them how things are meant to be done. In fairness, so do Americans. But, for instance, I never hear this shit from the French.
German history and culture was always about following rules and following a strong figure of authority, whether that be someone with a toothbrush moustache or someone making diamond hands.
hehehe, this made me chuckle. 25 years of hard-core socialists running the show, and all of a sudden its the conservatives that ruined Berlin. that is rich. It's even funnier when considering the Länderfinanzausgleich (Equalization payments between federal states): Basically within those 25 years Berlin, under those financially savvy and responsible leftists, amassed 95 B € in payments from all other German Federal States. [0]
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.
Ironically, the same people who complain about "slippery slopes" become the same people who bemoan the fact that American, Chinese, Russian, and even Vietnamese [0][1] intelligence operate with de facto impunity in Germany and the EU.
Europeans can no longer afford to be the idealists that they were in the 2000s. Every country is runnng influence ops across Europe to a degree that hasn't been seen since the Cold War.
That said, as an American, it's fine for me if Germans and Europeans remain naive. An allied Europe is good, but a naive but controlled Europe is equally as good. For every Atlanticist, we have people who can push our interests in an illiberal manner like Dominik Andrzejczuk.
> Europeans can no longer afford to be the idealists that they were in the 2000s.
Always the arguments of the enemies of freedom and dignity - they are fanciful ideals, not necessities and the whole point, and the foundations of the freeest, most secure, most prosperous societies in history. Maybe the rest of Europe wants to live more like Russia?
The American framing of privacy and free speech absolutism doesn't hold much credence in Europe. And it's not like the US is much better in that regard.
We in the US are using free speech and privacy absolutism as a hammer against the EU's Digital Services Act, which they are using as a hammer against our dominance in the tech industry and our trade barriers against European exports.
For most European nations today, the degree of greyzone warfare is startling, and multiple near accidents have happened. And even with expanded police and intelligence powers like those used in Europe in the 2000s, most European nations would remain significantly freer than Russia ever was or is.
That's a strawperson, not a serious argument. The idea that the US is absolutist about privacy is laughable, even more when compared to Europe. Free speech is falling apart rapidly. Europe is the central advocate of human rights currently.
> Europe is the central advocate of human rights currently
The European definition of human rights doesn't include a maximalist approach to privacy. The primacy of state powers is a core bedrock in mainstream European thought, as can be seen with EU Charter Article 8.
Hybrid warfare tactics such as those being used by Russia within the EU [0] along with other sorts of offensive intelligence operations would fall under the remit of an expansion of state enforcement and coexist with the EU Charter.
Furthermore, as I previously stated, this kind of empowerment of law enforcement and intelligence agencies was the norm across much of the EU (and still is in Southern and Eastern European member states) until the 2010s.
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.
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies across Europe were given de facto impunity due to Cold War era policies that were then rolled back in the 2010s.
In 2025-26, the threat profile that most European countries face is comparable in scale to what was the norm during the Cold War, except now most Western European intelligence and law enforcement agencies are not allowed to use the same tools they used to use barely 15 years ago.
As an American, it's fine for me if Germans and Europeans remain naive. An allied Europe is good, but a naive but controlled Europe is equally as good. For every Atlanticist, we have people who can push our interests in an illiberal manner like Dominik Andrzejczuk.
For every Vance, we got a Nuland, and American views on Europe began shifting all the way back in 2011 [0] (for all you guys who will spew the "Politico is Axel Springer" crap, this article is from 2011 - 13 years before the acquisition): "Europeans should be particularly concerned that a strong majority of Americans under the age of 45 now see Asia as more important than Europe" in 2011.
> 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
Not really. Data warehousing with cold/hot storage along with basic statistical analysis and inference has become cheap. And even local police departments can afford a $50k-$100k annual contract to work with red teams on bespoke exploit development.
The interesting thing is that the laws being created to protect against such extreme attacks will be used against the people when they are controlled by an extreme group.
That's how radicalization works, a pretty well-defined tactic as I understand it:
How do you get free, prosperous, safe people to give all that up for what you offer? It sounds almost impossible. You manufacture fear and division - look at terrorism, or the uses of demonization in many places - and then they may be willing to change.
Remember that Eisenhower said, 'the only thing we have to fear is fear itself'. Eisenhower, who led the militaries of West through arguably the greatest crisis in their history, who was leading the West through the Cold War. He knew crisis, and that is what he said. That's what genuine leaders do.
Those who use spread fear and radicalization are not after security and freedom, but after power.
Fair statement but it is generally accepted that extraordinary measures, like extraordinary claims require extreme evidence. That's just not the case here. To paraphrase Ben Frnaklin "Those who would give up liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." I think the corollary is that we actually get neither liberty nor safety.
Spit balling now ... I just feel like the years have rolled on by so quickly now, that we've aged out of all of the lessons we had to learn before. And now we're going to have to learn them all over again.
That explanation would only hold water if we were dealing right now with all kinds of problems stemming from lack of authoritarianism and too much freedom. I'm not really seeing it but maybe you have something in mind.
At least some people believe we do and vote for it. I'm not among those people and I don't hold this position, but somehow it gets more and more support lately.
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.
So is most technology, widespread literacy, health, freedom, etc. In fact, everything since we were nomadic hunter-gatherers is a blip - should we go back to that? The argument makes no sense; what force is compelling us to go back to hunting and gathering? It's absurd to raise this argument for inevitability, rather than do something about it - which has worked overwhelmingly for generations.
I'm not arguing you shouldn't do something about it. I'm a bit of a dreamer myself; I've basically carved out a life in a super rural area with almost no government -- but at the same time I like to be aware of the thoughts of great philosophers like Friedman and the history of this sort of liberalism and use it to my advantage. Knowing what I've stated has allowed me to deal with a world where I can't expect things to get better, even if I hope they will.
My personal take is you can use Friedman's thoughts to your advantage. Be prepared that everything will get much worse. And then maybe you can organize your life to minimize your interaction with the state in case your efforts don't help.
The idea that these are dreams is just part of the anti-democratic, anti-freedom rhetoric. You might not mean it that way, but look how it's been absorbed widely.
These are concrete realities that have swept across every corner of the world, and brought, by orders of magnitude, the greatest expansions of human freedom and prosperity ever. All in reality, not a dream.
This is what I come to HN for. To be called a peddler of anti-freedom rhetoric for dreaming of freedom, as a reply to single word quote. Because, you know, you're not allowed to dream if those dreams have at some point been "reality."
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.
I wonder why so many governments have such high anxiety right now. They're all acting like the sky is falling. Don't they know what happens to most of the chickens in Chicken Little?
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.
My theory for your downvotes - even though you are directly over the target - is that folks in Europe would rather blame Russia than address the very real dysfunction in their own societies. In fact, I tend to think that the degree to which an individual blames Russia is directly related to their failure to take responsibility for the crimes and misdeeds of their own state.
Perhaps its because people are realizing a lot of economic and financial activity is kind of useless for anything besides pumping the numbers of stocks and valuations and a larger fraction of money is going towards the already wealthy while the majority are losing out. And when financial bubbles start popping and economies fall flat on their faces there is going to be a lot of angry people.
People saying eat the rich and posting guillotines and supporting socialist redistribution ideas use to be kind of edgy and fringe, but now it is gaining popular appeal again, and it makes people with wealth or political power scared.
Several reasons. For one we've broken the climate and poisoned our habitat, this will for sure cause major problems for existing power structures. We're not sure when, just that it will, eventually. There will be massive amounts of refugees and unemployment, as well as strongly argued and broadly supported demands for accountability.
For another we've definitely decided to not put effort into international law and instead run with a might-makes-right kind of ethics in international relations. One sign that this was the case was the US repeatedly perpetrating the crime of aggression in the early 2000s, another was the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno Karabakh/Artsakh in 2023, as well as ongoing genocidal and similar campaigns in e.g. Sudan, DR Congo and likely the Caribbean and/or South America in the future. Ukraine is yet another example. Currently China is probably the last major country to heavily prioritise money and trade over atrocities and tribute.
Then there's the future of technology. Software has been treading water since the seventies while at the same time promising to deliver some utopian revolution anytime now. Sometimes it's promised to war machines, like GOFAI often was, sometimes it's promised to the general public, usually it doesn't deliver outside of making either legal conflict (i.e. commerce, political participation and the like) or illegal conflict (i.e. mafia, non-parliamentary/autonomous political participation, and the like) and the state response more efficient and intense.
Some in power expect computers to replace labour on a massive scale sometime soon, in part because that's a promise that has been made. Some also expect computerised fake persons and marketing-adjacent technologies to finally make democratic ambitions impossible to realise. It's also expected that people will have to be kept in their place for other, more mundane reasons.
Climate protests, anti-genocide protests and so on show that people are still willing to put themselves in harms way for some ethical purpose and hope for a decent future. This is very scary if you're a contemporary world leader, because there is this harsh disconnect between the stories you tell yourself and others in a similar position about what you do and how you're perceived by your constituents. Basically they think they're doing their best and that's admirable, and the rest of us think they're shit and deserve to be harshly punished.
There's also the spectre of history. Once upon a time ordinary people took a lot of power for themselves, and sometimes they just murdered their leaders. Dragged them out on a town square and chopped their heads off, or shot them or beat them with bamboo until they died. When the conditions look like it might be time for revolution and you're the one holding the levers of power you get scared. The might-makes-right-states are also scary, because those that haven't made the jump already don't have a bloc that backs them up, unlike the socialist states and the capitalist ones and the third world collective did way back when.
So, we're in a hurry to figure out how to make sure local populations cannot revolt, and next up is to figure out whether there are actually any allies or whether this is a war of all against all.
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.
Totalitarism slowly advancing in Europe. Recently I read an article about leftist groups and orgs being debanked. One of them is Huseyin Dogru, a Turkish/German journalist. German government acknowledges it, but can‘t see any problem with it as they hold the opinion that private banks can do whatever they want.
You are labelled „Putin versteher“ (someone who sides with Putin) or criticise Israel (in which case you are labelled antisemitic), and once you are labelled that way, you have fallen out of grace. And can be targeted or beaten on a demonstration brutally by police forces, or, debanked.
The moment you mention Israel on this platform, you are systematically downvoted. Not only on this platform. From corp media to social networks. From BBC who dares not use the word Genocide. To HN, where you are downvoted to oblivion the moment you say Israel is a genocidal racist apartheid regime.
The explanation is deceptively unclear, IMO. What's being authorized is court-ordered searches of a type that were previously prohibited, even for courts to authorize, by strict privacy laws. The US has always had the power to conduct these searches [0]; the "inviolability of the home" human dignity concept doesn't exist in the US. (I'll defer to German people to explain this concept).
As explained in heise.de[1] (in German) about a parallel law being enacted in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern,
> "For the online search, the deputies now also grant the law enforcement the right to secretly enter and search apartments with judicial permission."
[0] e.g. https://www.npr.org/2011/08/02/138916011/home-visits-and-oth... ("Home Visits And Other 'Secrets Of The FBI'")
[1] https://www.heise.de/news/Mecklenburg-Vorpommern-Durchsuchun...
> 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 [edit: public] 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.
I think the "inviolability" thing is useful just to understand what's actually happening here, but it's also important to understand that the US and Germany have very different criminal justice, search, and evidentiary systems. Germany doesn't have an exclusionary rule for evidence, for instance.
The boundaries of your "home" varies by State. For example, in some States the interior of your car is part of your home even when not at home, which occasionally has entertaining implications.
> the interior of your car is part of your home
Especially when you exclusively enter and exit the car inside your garage! /s
It also appears this Herman law allows “no knock” search warrants, which in the US are generally considered more serious and more restricted.
The distinction here is whether police can secretly enter a home to plant bugs, &c. In the US, this is routine; in Germany, this is (was?) taboo.
(FYI, you can escape * as \* to get it to display as *).
Thanks for the tip!
Is this even practical anymore? A non-technical person can set up video surveillance on their home for a couple hundred bucks. Why wouldn't a criminal do that? I think the days of the FBI planting a microphone in a lamp on Tony Soprano's basement are over.
It's hard to set up video surveillance in your home without inadvertently providing much of the surveillance data the law enforcement officers were after, especially for non-technical people.
I read in the papers that the cheap cameras are over wifi, so thieves are using wifi jammers to take them offline during the heist.
The trash search thing varies by state at least.
This article is not about warrantless searches of homes, though. In America, courts can and do order the police to secretly enter a domicile and install surveillance devices.
It's so frustrating that every other comment in this thread is people giving their pet opinion about the headline and what it means about the state of the world / the inherent authoritarianism of Germany / whatever, and nobody else is commenting on the contents.
The controversial measures the article lists are things like:
> Police may now install state-developed spyware, known as trojans, on personal devices to intercept messages before or after encryption. If the software cannot be deployed remotely, the law authorizes officers to secretly enter a person’s home to gain access.
> The revised law also changes how police use body cameras. Paragraph 24c permits activation of bodycams inside private homes when officers believe there is a risk to life or limb.
Those seem like... pretty reasonable things for the police to do, presuming it has a warrant? And if the law authorizes doing these things without warrants, maybe the article should have lead with that?
Ctrl+F-ing "warrant" in the article doesn't give me any result, which makes me feel this article isn't very serious.
Sounds like horrible overreach to me, even if such activities are legal in America (when did American police become the gold standard that Europe needs to emulate???!!)
Seriously, searching your home with a warrant is one thing. Doing it secretly without the homeowner knowing about it afterwards is some Stasi shit. Are they going to steal your dirty underwear too? And installing malware on the computers of people merely suspected of a crime is even more insane.
> And installing malware on the computers of people merely suspected of a crime is even more insane.
But it's not "merely suspected"! It's "suspected with enough evidence to convince a judge to issue the warrant". These are completely different things, and to intentionally confound the two is wildly disingenuous.
What is it about German culture that makes authoritarianism so popular?
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.
>Calling it "German authoritarianism" risks thinking it's a localized phenomenon or special case.
It very much is though. Plenty of other countries in EU like France or Romania for example but probably many more, don't have even remotely as many authoritarian and invasive BS laws as Germany does.
But the worst part is that Germans have gaslit themselves to think that their authoritarian laws are there "for their own protection". They don't even realize they have a problem, until they move and live abroad and learn you can run a country without your government have so many surveillance and speech control powers over what you can do or say in public about their leaders.
Just some data to give a little bit of context, however flawed or reductive it may be..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices#List_o...
I don't really care what some arbitrary number on Wikipedia tells me about the freedom of a country I know quite well, as long as I am unable to insult my political leaders on the internet for their fuckups or say that 'Israel is an apartheid state committing genocide', without police later knocking on my door to arrest me for "hate speech" or "far right extremism", I consider the freedom score of that country to be ZERO. This is mostly a UK, Germany and Austria exclusive issue in the EU-zone and not an EU widespread issue quite yet, but boy they sure are trying to get everyone at that same level.
Any scientist will tell you to not to look at the end data, but to look at the formula used to calculate the result and the way in which the data for the study was gathered. That's what's most important.
Depending on what your formula and data is, you can get to any arbitrary result you want, which is how scientists also had studies in the 1950s saying that smoking was good for your health.
That said, why would anyone think such scores could be a reasonably accurate representation? You are aggregating such complex situations and with that you kill off nuance. It doesn't mean the scores are useless, but need to be used carefully. I mean even look at the chart and you'll see weird things pop out. Ireland is ranked 5th by the "Freedom in the World" Index and falls into the highest binning for all 3 categories: economic freedom, press freedom, democracy. Yet New Zealand is 3rd, falling into the second bins for economic and press freedom. Further down you see the US below Argentina yet the US's scores are significantly higher than Argentina in each other category and the US is tied with Mongolia (who has a major problem with Press Freedom).
It should be quite clear that these scores are missing a lot of important details. Like the US definitely has problems with Freedom of Speech (and growing) but you can call Trump and Clinton pedos on the internet all day and nothing will happen to you[0]. Nuance is needed and treating these indexes as black boxes is just harmful to a conversation about freedom.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c04vqldn42go
In my opinion its: Village life. Germany is a state of small villages/towns/cities/city-states, interconnected with fairly productive lines of communication - but it is very easy to live ones entire life in a German village and never leave.
At village scales, authoritarianism is given more credence by the individual because ones life boundaries are reduced to the immediate environment, which is not really sustainable without structured hierarchy.
Incidentally, this is also a factor in why American’s adopt authoritarianism so rapidly as well - spending 3 hours of ones life in a bubble, on the freeway, commuting, is extremely damaging to ones psyche. Road-rage and neighbor hatred abound in such circumstances.
The solution to authoritarianism is travel beyond ones bounds. The roots of totalitarian-authoritarianism grow deeply in the desire to be free of the ‘filth of others’ - once you expand your horizons to embrace that ‘filth of others’, through travel and cultural interaction, that ‘filth of others’ becomes ‘the flavor of others’ instead.
This is easily demonstrated: talk to a German who has never left their home town/talk to a German who regularly visits vastly different parts of the world. You will see the authoritarian in the former, but the libertarian in the latter.
Libertarian is not always better. A Goldilocks position is the best. Change is okay but you must first understand why boundaries and norms were created (Chesterton's fence). Extremely tolerant people also allow authoritarian cultures to settle, create enclaves and outnumber their own culture which is a bit of an own goal.
This seems a bit incoherent, there must be a real reason for them to start thinking the “filth of others” has some basis in reality…
It couldn’t have arisen just randomly or on a lark.
The “filth of others” can be described in as many ways as a human might use to justify their elevation of one tribe over the degradation of another.
Look at it critically - whenever you encounter a totalitarian-authoritarian personality bloviating about “those people over there” (others), its usually based on the totalitarian mechanism of ‘avoiding affinity with attributes considered unsavoury’ (filth).
This concept has other applications. If you have two villages, separated perhaps by a near-insurmountable mountain or lake, or if one of those villages raises cows while the other raises goats - this is usually the basis of the formation of a new dialect, accent, or indeed entirely new language. However, when civilization occurs and those two villages merge into a broader community, that language changes to become a unity.
This is observable at an individual level, too. Any unacknowledged or under-recognized similarities/identities/differences between two or more entities will inevitably be used to justify segregation of those entities. The solution, as always, is to identify similarities/identities/differences in a cohesive manner - this is anathema to the totalitarian-authoritarian personality, who is usually pretty stubborn about enforcing, in totality, those under-acknowledged facets.
I don’t see how this addresses the issue of there being an underlying real reason?
Of course the reason then subsquently can be inflated, conflated, mixed together strangely, contorted, etc… I’m not doubting that.
The underlying reason is a lack of cultural fluidity, or in other words, an over-abundance of cultural rigidity, which manifests as a desire to be free of other cultures.
The most effective antidote to totalitarian-authoritarianism is a one-way ticket to somewhere distant.
German villages, as comfortable as they are, don’t really promote this antidote.
Germans love rules and hate those who don’t (source: scolded by several Germans while travelling there)
Why don't you share what you did to get scolded by several Germans and I will explain to you why.
Have you ever noticed how often Germans online like to say "That's not how we do it in Germany..." "We don't do that in Germany..." "In Germany we..." ?
Germans seem to have a cultural thing going on where they think the way they do things is the most logical and correct way, and think they're doing everybody else a favor by telling them how things are meant to be done. In fairness, so do Americans. But, for instance, I never hear this shit from the French.
German history and culture was always about following rules and following a strong figure of authority, whether that be someone with a toothbrush moustache or someone making diamond hands.
After decades of a liberal and left senate, Berliners reelected CDU who bankrupted Berlin 25 years ago.
hehehe, this made me chuckle. 25 years of hard-core socialists running the show, and all of a sudden its the conservatives that ruined Berlin. that is rich. It's even funnier when considering the Länderfinanzausgleich (Equalization payments between federal states): Basically within those 25 years Berlin, under those financially savvy and responsible leftists, amassed 95 B € in payments from all other German Federal States. [0]
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A4nderfinanzausgleich
Fighting extremist terrorism requires tough measures. This one is a bit extra though:
> If the software cannot be deployed remotely, the law authorizes officers to secretly enter a person’s home to gain access.
Clear Das Leben der Anderen vibes. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others)
However: As usual, the devil is in the details. How much suspicion is required, what's the process, etc. (I assume that a judge needs to sign off.)
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 slippery slope argument always seemed... slippery, to me.
Ironically, the same people who complain about "slippery slopes" become the same people who bemoan the fact that American, Chinese, Russian, and even Vietnamese [0][1] intelligence operate with de facto impunity in Germany and the EU.
Europeans can no longer afford to be the idealists that they were in the 2000s. Every country is runnng influence ops across Europe to a degree that hasn't been seen since the Cold War.
That said, as an American, it's fine for me if Germans and Europeans remain naive. An allied Europe is good, but a naive but controlled Europe is equally as good. For every Atlanticist, we have people who can push our interests in an illiberal manner like Dominik Andrzejczuk.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-25/berlin-ki...
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-18/vietnam-p...
> Europeans can no longer afford to be the idealists that they were in the 2000s.
Always the arguments of the enemies of freedom and dignity - they are fanciful ideals, not necessities and the whole point, and the foundations of the freeest, most secure, most prosperous societies in history. Maybe the rest of Europe wants to live more like Russia?
The American framing of privacy and free speech absolutism doesn't hold much credence in Europe. And it's not like the US is much better in that regard.
We in the US are using free speech and privacy absolutism as a hammer against the EU's Digital Services Act, which they are using as a hammer against our dominance in the tech industry and our trade barriers against European exports.
For most European nations today, the degree of greyzone warfare is startling, and multiple near accidents have happened. And even with expanded police and intelligence powers like those used in Europe in the 2000s, most European nations would remain significantly freer than Russia ever was or is.
> absolutism
That's a strawperson, not a serious argument. The idea that the US is absolutist about privacy is laughable, even more when compared to Europe. Free speech is falling apart rapidly. Europe is the central advocate of human rights currently.
> Europe is the central advocate of human rights currently
The European definition of human rights doesn't include a maximalist approach to privacy. The primacy of state powers is a core bedrock in mainstream European thought, as can be seen with EU Charter Article 8.
Hybrid warfare tactics such as those being used by Russia within the EU [0] along with other sorts of offensive intelligence operations would fall under the remit of an expansion of state enforcement and coexist with the EU Charter.
Furthermore, as I previously stated, this kind of empowerment of law enforcement and intelligence agencies was the norm across much of the EU (and still is in Southern and Eastern European member states) until the 2010s.
[0] - https://acleddata.com/report/testing-waters-suspected-russia...
> The European definition of human rights doesn't include a maximalist approach to privacy.
Who said it does? That's a strawperson.
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.
The cost aspect and its consequences: That's a good insight.
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies across Europe were given de facto impunity due to Cold War era policies that were then rolled back in the 2010s.
In 2025-26, the threat profile that most European countries face is comparable in scale to what was the norm during the Cold War, except now most Western European intelligence and law enforcement agencies are not allowed to use the same tools they used to use barely 15 years ago.
As an American, it's fine for me if Germans and Europeans remain naive. An allied Europe is good, but a naive but controlled Europe is equally as good. For every Atlanticist, we have people who can push our interests in an illiberal manner like Dominik Andrzejczuk.
For every Vance, we got a Nuland, and American views on Europe began shifting all the way back in 2011 [0] (for all you guys who will spew the "Politico is Axel Springer" crap, this article is from 2011 - 13 years before the acquisition): "Europeans should be particularly concerned that a strong majority of Americans under the age of 45 now see Asia as more important than Europe" in 2011.
> 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
Not really. Data warehousing with cold/hot storage along with basic statistical analysis and inference has become cheap. And even local police departments can afford a $50k-$100k annual contract to work with red teams on bespoke exploit development.
[0] - https://www.politico.eu/article/americans-turn-their-backs-o...
What are you calling "extremist terrorism"?
E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Berlin_truck_attack (13+1 deaths, 56 injured)
That was almost 10 years ago. That does not an existential threat make.
Then why do they put Merkel's lego (concrete blocks) at every winter market now?
The interesting thing is that the laws being created to protect against such extreme attacks will be used against the people when they are controlled by an extreme group.
That's how radicalization works, a pretty well-defined tactic as I understand it:
How do you get free, prosperous, safe people to give all that up for what you offer? It sounds almost impossible. You manufacture fear and division - look at terrorism, or the uses of demonization in many places - and then they may be willing to change.
Remember that Eisenhower said, 'the only thing we have to fear is fear itself'. Eisenhower, who led the militaries of West through arguably the greatest crisis in their history, who was leading the West through the Cold War. He knew crisis, and that is what he said. That's what genuine leaders do.
Those who use spread fear and radicalization are not after security and freedom, but after power.
And, to put it more explicitly, against the people who were manipulated into fearing the "extremist" threat in the first place.
There have been a number of similar attacks in Germany since. There are no signs of this stopping.
Noone claimed it was an existential threat.
Fair statement but it is generally accepted that extraordinary measures, like extraordinary claims require extreme evidence. That's just not the case here. To paraphrase Ben Frnaklin "Those who would give up liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." I think the corollary is that we actually get neither liberty nor safety.
but it is generally accepted that extraordinary measures, like extraordinary claims require extreme evidence
I think you also don't know what kind of evidence this new legislation requires.
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.
Most likely under the same tests the the G10 Act has.
Spit balling now ... I just feel like the years have rolled on by so quickly now, that we've aged out of all of the lessons we had to learn before. And now we're going to have to learn them all over again.
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.
That explanation would only hold water if we were dealing right now with all kinds of problems stemming from lack of authoritarianism and too much freedom. I'm not really seeing it but maybe you have something in mind.
At least some people believe we do and vote for it. I'm not among those people and I don't hold this position, but somehow it gets more and more support lately.
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.
So is most technology, widespread literacy, health, freedom, etc. In fact, everything since we were nomadic hunter-gatherers is a blip - should we go back to that? The argument makes no sense; what force is compelling us to go back to hunting and gathering? It's absurd to raise this argument for inevitability, rather than do something about it - which has worked overwhelmingly for generations.
Is-ought distinction. Mothballed and Milton are describing how things are, not how they should be, which latter seems to be your interpretation.
I'm not arguing you shouldn't do something about it. I'm a bit of a dreamer myself; I've basically carved out a life in a super rural area with almost no government -- but at the same time I like to be aware of the thoughts of great philosophers like Friedman and the history of this sort of liberalism and use it to my advantage. Knowing what I've stated has allowed me to deal with a world where I can't expect things to get better, even if I hope they will.
My personal take is you can use Friedman's thoughts to your advantage. Be prepared that everything will get much worse. And then maybe you can organize your life to minimize your interaction with the state in case your efforts don't help.
> dreamer
The idea that these are dreams is just part of the anti-democratic, anti-freedom rhetoric. You might not mean it that way, but look how it's been absorbed widely.
These are concrete realities that have swept across every corner of the world, and brought, by orders of magnitude, the greatest expansions of human freedom and prosperity ever. All in reality, not a dream.
This is what I come to HN for. To be called a peddler of anti-freedom rhetoric for dreaming of freedom, as a reply to single word quote. Because, you know, you're not allowed to dream if those dreams have at some point been "reality."
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.
I wonder why so many governments have such high anxiety right now. They're all acting like the sky is falling. Don't they know what happens to most of the chickens in Chicken Little?
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.
My theory for your downvotes - even though you are directly over the target - is that folks in Europe would rather blame Russia than address the very real dysfunction in their own societies. In fact, I tend to think that the degree to which an individual blames Russia is directly related to their failure to take responsibility for the crimes and misdeeds of their own state.
European governments anxious yet refuse switch to wartime production...
Perhaps its because people are realizing a lot of economic and financial activity is kind of useless for anything besides pumping the numbers of stocks and valuations and a larger fraction of money is going towards the already wealthy while the majority are losing out. And when financial bubbles start popping and economies fall flat on their faces there is going to be a lot of angry people.
People saying eat the rich and posting guillotines and supporting socialist redistribution ideas use to be kind of edgy and fringe, but now it is gaining popular appeal again, and it makes people with wealth or political power scared.
Several reasons. For one we've broken the climate and poisoned our habitat, this will for sure cause major problems for existing power structures. We're not sure when, just that it will, eventually. There will be massive amounts of refugees and unemployment, as well as strongly argued and broadly supported demands for accountability.
For another we've definitely decided to not put effort into international law and instead run with a might-makes-right kind of ethics in international relations. One sign that this was the case was the US repeatedly perpetrating the crime of aggression in the early 2000s, another was the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno Karabakh/Artsakh in 2023, as well as ongoing genocidal and similar campaigns in e.g. Sudan, DR Congo and likely the Caribbean and/or South America in the future. Ukraine is yet another example. Currently China is probably the last major country to heavily prioritise money and trade over atrocities and tribute.
Then there's the future of technology. Software has been treading water since the seventies while at the same time promising to deliver some utopian revolution anytime now. Sometimes it's promised to war machines, like GOFAI often was, sometimes it's promised to the general public, usually it doesn't deliver outside of making either legal conflict (i.e. commerce, political participation and the like) or illegal conflict (i.e. mafia, non-parliamentary/autonomous political participation, and the like) and the state response more efficient and intense.
Some in power expect computers to replace labour on a massive scale sometime soon, in part because that's a promise that has been made. Some also expect computerised fake persons and marketing-adjacent technologies to finally make democratic ambitions impossible to realise. It's also expected that people will have to be kept in their place for other, more mundane reasons.
Climate protests, anti-genocide protests and so on show that people are still willing to put themselves in harms way for some ethical purpose and hope for a decent future. This is very scary if you're a contemporary world leader, because there is this harsh disconnect between the stories you tell yourself and others in a similar position about what you do and how you're perceived by your constituents. Basically they think they're doing their best and that's admirable, and the rest of us think they're shit and deserve to be harshly punished.
There's also the spectre of history. Once upon a time ordinary people took a lot of power for themselves, and sometimes they just murdered their leaders. Dragged them out on a town square and chopped their heads off, or shot them or beat them with bamboo until they died. When the conditions look like it might be time for revolution and you're the one holding the levers of power you get scared. The might-makes-right-states are also scary, because those that haven't made the jump already don't have a bloc that backs them up, unlike the socialist states and the capitalist ones and the third world collective did way back when.
So, we're in a hurry to figure out how to make sure local populations cannot revolt, and next up is to figure out whether there are actually any allies or whether this is a war of all against all.
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.
> Can't imagine why they'd be anxious.
Me neither, especially since the adults are back in charge in the US.
Totalitarism slowly advancing in Europe. Recently I read an article about leftist groups and orgs being debanked. One of them is Huseyin Dogru, a Turkish/German journalist. German government acknowledges it, but can‘t see any problem with it as they hold the opinion that private banks can do whatever they want.
You are labelled „Putin versteher“ (someone who sides with Putin) or criticise Israel (in which case you are labelled antisemitic), and once you are labelled that way, you have fallen out of grace. And can be targeted or beaten on a demonstration brutally by police forces, or, debanked.
The moment you mention Israel on this platform, you are systematically downvoted. Not only on this platform. From corp media to social networks. From BBC who dares not use the word Genocide. To HN, where you are downvoted to oblivion the moment you say Israel is a genocidal racist apartheid regime.
Yet another step towards Turnkey Totalitarianism
https://creativetimereports.org/2013/06/25/surveillance-and-...