Article By Christina Maas
The German government has discovered a clever way to expand its surveillance powers: call it “transparency.” The federal cabinet has approved a bill that would let state agents enter media offices and digital platforms without needing a judge’s permission.
The official justification, ensuring honesty in political advertising, sounds harmless enough until you read the fine print and realize it’s about as transparent as a brick wall.
The “Political Advertising Transparency Act” is described as an effort to align with new EU rules on political ad disclosure.
What it actually does is grant the Bundesnetzagentur, a telecom regulator, search powers usually reserved for criminal investigators.
If the agency suspects a company has failed to file the right paperwork, it could send its people to “inspect” offices without a court order, provided they claim there’s an “imminent danger.”
“Imminent danger” is one of those magic bureaucratic phrases that can mean anything from “credible bomb threat” to “somebody forgot to upload a PDF.”
Once that phrase appears in law, the limits become a matter of interpretation.
Legal experts have warned that the law tramples Germany’s Basic Law, which guarantees the inviolability of the home. For journalists, the stakes are higher.
Confidential sources, ongoing investigations, and protected data could all be exposed to inspection because a regulator feels “concerned” about compliance.
In plain language: this opens the door to state intrusion under the banner of good governance.
The government insists the outrage is misplaced. Officials say this is just Germany meeting EU obligations and point to similar inspection powers in data protection and consumer regulation.
By their logic, since regulators can already check how companies handle shopping data, they should also be able to walk into a newsroom. It’s all regulation, they argue.
Journalism is not retail. And “protecting democracy” by granting bureaucrats unsupervised search powers is an interpretation that would have made earlier German lawmakers choke on their coffee.
If this bill passes, regulators, not judges, will decide when it’s acceptable to cross a newsroom’s threshold.
Germany’s postwar press protections were built on the principle that the state should never again decide what counts as acceptable reporting. This law erases that boundary. It may begin with political ads, but it ends with regulators deciding when democracy needs an “inspection.”
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