Berlin: Police can secretly enter homes for state trojan installation
Here’s from Heise Online, “Berlin: Police can secretly enter homes for state trojan installation” (December 25th, 2025):
To collect data from IT systems, investigators in Berlin can secretly search suspects’ rooms. This is in a Police Act amendment.
With the majority of the coalition of CDU and SPD, as well as the votes of the opposition AfD, the Berlin House of Representatives passed a comprehensive amendment to the General Security and Public Order Act (ASOG) on Thursday. The reform grants the police powers that deeply interfere with fundamental rights and cross previous red lines of the capital’s security policy.
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The explosive innovation is hidden in paragraphs 26a and 26b. These regulate so-called source telecommunications surveillance (Quellen-TKÜ) and secret online searches. In order to intercept communication on devices such as smartphones or laptops before or after decryption, the police may use malware such as state Trojans.
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But the new Police Act goes a step further: If remote installation of the spyware is technically not possible, paragraph 26 explicitly allows investigators to “secretly enter and search premises” in order to gain access to IT systems. In fact, Berlin is thus legalizing – as Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania did before – state intrusion into private apartments in order to physically install Trojans, for example via USB stick. IT security experts not only warn about leaving vulnerabilities open. They also see a constitutional violation in the combination of residential space violation and digital investigation.
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