Comment by sebtron

Same for Italian constitution.

But you know how it goes with law: all you need is a supreme-court equivalent to judge what are the boundaries and exact definition of those articles..

the GDR phrasing is much stronger and less ambiguous than the ECHR one. however, given what we know of the Stazi I'm skeptical they honored it.

> > "Postal and telecommunications secrecy are inviolable."

So phone taps are illegal in Germany? Police can't record what you're talking on the phone?

Germany does not have what could be considered a constitution, or a Verfassung in German.

The article 31 is not even protected by the “Eternity Clause” that, ironically can simply be removed by the legislature.

But it seems relatively irrelevant anyways, as all western governments seem to just ignore all fundamental laws if it suits them, let alone regular laws, regardless of constitution or not. And that does not even go into the fact that the illegitimate EU just de facto supersedes all legitimate national laws.

There’s no such clause in current version (and it’s article 7, not 8).

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/treaty/char_2012/oj/eng

But the key words here are "in accordance with the law" and "necessary in a democratic society." That's a pretty high bar, not a free pass.

They shouldn't have even bothered with the first part.

That doesn't say what kind of interference, nor does it say anyone is required to provide assistance to them.

There’s no regulation on content of the post, so you can encrypt your message, print it and send it by post. Equivalent of the court order in digital world is the permission to obtain whatever version of the content is available.

Mandating that all mail should be written in such a way that someone from the government could understand it, is clear overreach.

In practice there are physical limits on how much phonecalls or snail mails can be improperly publicized.

Online even the stuff that very rich companies struggle very hard to keep private regularly gets publicized in bulk.

You might think in terms of "medium is the message" so you can't directly transfer something that works in principle for one medium to another.

If they get a court order then they can start trying to break the encryption.

But you're not obligated to make it easy for law enforcement to enforce any potential court orders, though. It's perfectly legal to install a safe that is impossible to open without destroying its contents, for example.

> ...why must privacy extend to online?

Because "online" is just as real as "offline"? It's all people communicating with other people.

In the US, I can do business under an alias, just so long as I'm not assuming that alias with the intent to defraud. In the US, I can anonymously drop a letter in a postbox to be sent anywhere in the US.

However, government agents can certainly discover my "wallet identity" in both of those situations with the application of some effort. Why would it be important to you that people doing business "online" must do that business in such a way as to make it require zero effort for a government agent to discover their "wallet identity"? Why would it be important to you that people who conduct their business electronically have far, far less privacy than people who conduct their business with paper and in-person appearances?

Last weeks events were a huge tragedy. But lets assume mass spying and no encryption, how would that have stopped it? A schizophrenic with a knife, or a political extremist with a gun, isn't something that necessitates coordination.

Genuine question: why not?

To start an answer I would say is dangerous territory to say „online must not follow the rules of offline“. My expectantion would be as general principle „onlinity“ is irrelevant. As far as sensible of course.

You can ask yourself why privacy is beneficial at all?

And it's because revealing breaches of social etiquette might lead to conflicts and unrest between serfs. Which lower their economic efficiency in their service to landlords.

Online is not unique in any way. It even should have more privacy because people reveal too much voluntarily already leading to all kinds of unrest.

How many people's economic activity was disrupted because they couldn't keep their cheering of Charlie Kirk's demise in private for example?

> Genuinely curious, why must privacy extend to online?

Because governments lack the maturity to judge contents. You would subject private communications to mob justice of populist political discourse. It is not rocket science that it wouldn't work.

I assume you refer to the killing, which was done offline with a physical weapon.

do you think less online anonymity would've prevented Lincoln's assassination too?

Privacy in sealed mail is different than privacy when you are shouting on the street corner.

I think an interesting experiment would be to create a social platform where all identities must be verified and public and all messaging must also be public. If you could verify identities well enough, this would create a platform where everyone is saying everything knowing it's traced to their identity. Perhaps the information communicated on such a platform would be considered to have more weight than information spewed on pseudo and fully anonymous platforms.

Having a ready made list of everyone's thoughts on every topic and the ability to sift through every tedious mountain of data with software to classify everyone according to every sort of ideology would certainly be handy if your nation ever became a fascist dystopia.

You could end up having to not only not critique your personal Hitler but praise him to get the right score to work in civil service or not only not only not say pro lgbtq talking points but spout pro bigot positions to qualify as a teacher helping to create first the illusion then the reality of the universiality of these positions.

Imagine how well the French resistance would have gone if all the trouble makers or likelyoffenders had been shot preemptively!