So the fact that Germany is home to one of the world’s biggest Internet exchange points—where data crosses between the networks that make up the Internet—has given a lot of power to the country’s equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency.
The Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND, gets to freely sift through all the foreign traffic passing through that exchange junction in search of nuggets that can be shared with overseas partners such as the NSA. But now that power is in jeopardy, thanks to a Tuesday ruling from Germany’s constitutional court...
“With its decision, the Federal Constitutional Court has clarified for the first time that the protection afforded by fundamental rights vis-à-vis German state authority is not restricted to the German territory,” the court said in a statement.
The German chapter of Reporters Without Borders, which brought the case in partnership with the Berlin-based Society for Civil Rights (GFF) and a few other journalists’ associations, is overjoyed. more
