Germany's Constitutional Court has spoken: by nullifying North Rhine-Westphalia's 'law on protection of the constitution' and creating a new basic right to 'integrity and confidentiality of IT systems' as a part of personal rights, many of the dubious developments of the last few months in Germany are restrained. In its explanations, the court shows more technological appreciation than many journalists of the mass media. So various techniques like keyloggers or capturing of electromagnetic radiation are mentioned and the judges declare that not everything is allowed to the state that might be technically possible. Online eavesdropping with trojans or unheralded surveillance of user owned data are massively made difficult for prosecutors, and that's very good news.

The next weeks will show how our politicians will react on this. Our minister of the interiour, Wolfgang Schäuble, announced fast steps to declare new laws on online surveillance and I'm not sure if he understood yesterday's judgement completely. We'll stay tuned.

At least one minister of justice (North Rhine-Westphalia's Ingo Wolf (FDP)) and a complete political party - SPD - disgraced themselves: the first by implementing that law that has been declared anticonstitutional yesterday, and the Social Democrats by waving through Schäuble's draft laws on online surveillance, waiting for the courts to overturn them. I call this a poor performance.