Source: Deutsche Welle (DW)

The Bundestag approved a new federal police law that broadens federal police powers to employ drones, AI-supported facial recognition, “behaviour recognition” on surveillance footage, expanded telecommunications surveillance, and measures to detain immigrants pending deportation. The government presented the law as necessary to address technological developments and evolving threats to public safety, and it includes new rules for deploying drones in busy train stations and near borders as well as tools to counter potentially threatening unmanned aerial vehicles, including signal jammers and, as a last resort, firearms.

Civil liberties and digital-rights advocates warn the law creates the conditions for mass surveillance by enabling technologies and databases to be used nationwide rather than only by state police or in isolated operations. Critics quoted include Clara Bünger (Left Party), Michael Kolain (head of policy at the Berlin-based Center for Digital Rights and Democracy), Markus Thiel (professor of public law at the German Police University in Münster), and Julia Duchrow (Amnesty International Germany), who raised concerns about breaches of basic rights, lack of transparency about AI processing, risks of intrusive access to end-user devices, racial profiling in spot checks, and the absence of strengthened safeguards. The piece notes that legal challenges to the law are likely to be brought before Germany’s Constitutional Court, and observers say such litigation can take many years while the law remains operable.