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Comment by RamblingCTO

5 days ago

I really don't get it. It's against the German constitution and yet there are still politicians pushing for that, again and again. We should make it mandatory that when something is clearly against the constitution you loose your job as a politician. It won't work anyway. It's the same spiel wasting so much money and time. Do we know which lobby group/party is pushing for that yet again?

29 comments

RamblingCTO

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graemep  5 days ago

Is it clearly against the constitution?

What happens when the constitution clashes with EU law?

Can the constitution be amended and is it likely if there is a clash with EU law on this issue?

Enormous pressure can be brought to bear in politicians over something like this. The most prominent British politician to oppose the Online Safety Act in the UK is being labelled as "helping people like Jimmy Saville" by the government (Saville was a TV presenter and notorious child abuser) .

  • arlort  5 days ago

    > What happens when the constitution clashes with EU law?

    Usually a standoff based on whether the EU was delegated authority on the topic. If the delegation happened then EU law has precedence but depending on the topic national constitutional courts might ignore that which becomes a constitutional crisis

    In this specific case it's much more likely that the ECJ shoots down the chat control part of the law before it gets to that anyway

  • dmesg  5 days ago

    It is against it and the law was revoked twice already by liberal politician SLS: 2nd March 2010 - 1 BvR 256/08 I don't like this rhetorical style were easy to prove facts are denounced with questions to evoke uncertainty.

    If you now say this is not applicable as this is about storing connection data you don't understand the issue in full: This is a deeper incision than just storing connection logs. This violates a more fundamental right. We are talking about chats here. Not what IPs you connected to at what time (and that law was canned as violating the entire constitution, which i cited with the state's decision above). There is no middleground here.

derelicta  5 days ago

A constitution is just a piece of paper. The ruling class can discard it as they wish.

  • bee_rider  5 days ago

    The current ruling class consists of people who did well in (somewhat, at least) transparent rule-of-law conditions. They can discard the laws if they want I guess, but they should take a lesson from Putin’s Russia—they are rich now, but without laws some intelligence officer can chuck them out of windows until someone in their family tree is willing to pay up. (Not that they need to look to Russia for an example, it is just a recent one, their own history books are full of these guys).

    Actually, I think they are aware of that, which is why they keep trying to do the paperwork properly.

betaby  5 days ago

> It's against the German constitution

No one cares. Like anywhere in the world.

  • RamblingCTO  5 days ago

    I think your comment was taken as "no one cares about Germany"/being snarky. But it can also be read as "those who should do not respect the constitution, like anywhere in the world". I assume the latter, am I correct?

    • betaby  5 days ago

      'Constitution' arguments are used by ones in power only to server their agenda. Constitution argument won't save us from the surveillance. Most of the time western countries play 'national security' and 'think of the children' to circumvent the constitution and have ~100% success rate.

      4 replies →

  • IncreasePosts  5 days ago

    Just saying "It's unconstitutional" doesn't really cut it. It's a question for the courts to decide (based on the constitution).

    • bee_rider  5 days ago

      A constitution is the basic big-picture law of the country. The court’s interpretation should be easy to guess. Otherwise, the people won’t feel like it is their document.

      Rule of law is aided by laws that people know how to follow.

      4 replies →