Overview

• The Bundesverfassungsgericht ruled that Quellen-Telekommunikationsüberwachung is unconstitutional for offences punishable by up to three years’ imprisonment, voiding existing orders in those cases.
• Judges held that the high intrusion of state-deployed spyware requires limiting trojan deployments to investigations of particularly serious crimes under a strict proportionality test.
• The court found parts of the hidden online search regime incompatible with the Basic Law due to procedural and citation errors, but left the rules in force pending legislative overhaul.
• North Rhine-Westphalia’s police law survived review, as it confines state-trojan authorisations to crimes carrying at least ten years’ imprisonment or with a terrorist background.
• Privacy advocates welcomed strengthened civil liberties while police unions warned that tighter thresholds could hamper probes into organized and terrorist crime.