A draft law released by the German union for data protection (DVD) this week revealed that the interior ministry was proposing to drastically limit the powers of Germany’s data protection authorities, banning them from investigating suspected breaches of people’s medical and legal records.
As well as expanding video surveillance with facial recognition software, the bill would limit the government’s own data protection commissioners to checking that the technical prerequisites are in place to ensure that doctors’ and lawyers’ files are secure, but it stops them from following up when citizens report concerns that their data has been leaked.
The bill would also shut down citizens’ right to know what data is being collected about them – even by private firms, if releasing that information would “seriously endanger” a company’s “business purposes,” the SZ quoted the draft as saying. Thilo Weichert, former data protection commissioner for the state of Schleswig-Holstein and now DVD board member, condemned de Maiziere’s plans as a “massive” erosion of privacy in Germany…
Perhaps most contentiously, the draft allows the government to deny people the basic right to know what personal data is being collected if “the release of the data endangers public safety and order, or disadvantages the well-being of the country, or the state in another way.”
My guess is they have identified areas that are vital in a collapse scenario – areas around financial centers, government centers, home neighborhoods of the elites, and infrastructure of importance, and everyone in those areas is getting a general profile detailing political engagement, ideology, confrontationalism/aggression, passivity, finances, attitude toward government, personality, maybe even how much they have to lose. If you are an aggressive right winger who hates government, your finances are a wreck, and you have a terminal diagnosis giving you three months to live, they want to know before the shit goes down and you go into high amygdala.
More and more I think the machine sees a worse Apocalypse coming than even I do. Then again, when the Apocalypse hits, I’m not going to be the one getting blamed for it. Maybe if I was, I would see things as a lot worse than I already do.