Talkleft is sharing a translation of a Bavarian Radio report on an
interesting court ruling in Germany:
The Federal Constitutional Court [located in Karlsruhe, their highest court] has drastically limited the
possibilities and opportunities for dragnet/grid/screening searches (data-mining) and thereby rolled back limitations on people’s
civil liberties in the fight against Terror.In a decision made public today, the justices stated that foreign policy tensions or a collective threat level such as after the
attacks of 9/11/01 do not suffice to permit the dragnet/grid/screen searches.[...]
I have mixed thoughts about this.
On the one hand, it’s good to see a court ruling that a vague generalized threat of terror is not sufficient to legally cause the
erosion of civil liberties, particularly in the form of one’s right to privacy.
On the other hand, I don’t like seeing data-mining written off as being inherently evil. It’s a tool. Like other tools, it can be
used in an “evil” manner, as well as a “good” one. I’ve written previously about one way that a data-mining
exercise could (I think) be undertaken without significant erosion of privacy rights.
Sadly, the message that seems to be making it to the masses is just “data-mining = bad”.