German High Court Curbs Database-Mining

[Judi Lynn]

German High Court Curbs Database-Mining

By GEIR MOULSON
Associated Press Writer

May 23, 2006, 12:34 PM EDT

BERLIN -- Trawling databases to profile potential terror suspects is illegal except in specific cases of "concrete danger," Germany's highest court ruled Tuesday in handing a victory for a Moroccan student.

The student, whose name has not been made public, sued a German state after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to stop it from mining university and government databases to identify Muslim students between the ages of 18 and 40.

A top regional official said the decision by the Federal Constitutional Court would have little effect on security. The court said that the program had not identified any terrorist "sleepers."

The court ruled that random data trawling was legal only in the event of a specific danger, rather than a broad, elevated threat.

"A general threat situation of the kind that has existed in regard to terrorist attacks continuously since Sept. 11, 2001, or foreign policy tensions, are not sufficient to order data profiling," it said in its ruling.
(snip/...)

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-germany-terror-profiling,0,935356.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines

[TechBear_Seattle]

1. Obviously, this was a foreign country and not "the land of the free"

Such a ruling by the US Supreme Court is very unlikely within the forseeable future.

[Gormy Cuss]

2. To have this particular country make the ruling is to me the most

significant part of the story. After all, they've got experience with governments exerting too much control over citizens.

[fshrink]

4. Or the "home of the brave", where

histrionic scalias rule and the commander in chief hides.

[ticapnews]

3. Oh sweet irony.

[Rose Siding]

5. "terrorists cannot be caught through data profiling"

snip>
Ingo Wolf, the interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, the state sued by the plaintiff, said the new limit would not harm anti-terrorism efforts.

The experience shows that "terrorists cannot be caught through data profiling," Wolf said.

[Viva_La_Revolution]

6. "The supreme court judges, however, ruled in his favor...

... by a 6-2 margin, finding that his right to determine how information about him was used had been violated."


Imagine that!

[NoAmericanTaliban]

7. Good for Germany. Now we need to do that in Amerika as well.