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Federal Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer (CSU)
Photo: Clemens Bilan / Getty Images
You are probably asking yourself: »Why now Seehofer of all people?
Aren't there other candidates who would have to be thrown out first? «Absolutely understandable, because Federal Transport Minister Andreas» Mautdesaster «Scheuer should have lost his job years ago, and that the resignation of Health Minister Jens Spahn is slowly being considered very seriously should pull, Dirk Kurbjuweit explained here this week.
Christian Stöcker, arrow to the right
Photo: SPIEGEL ONLINE
Born 1973, is a cognitive psychologist and has been a professor at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW) since autumn 2016.
There he is responsible for the "Digital Communication" course.
Before that, he headed the Netzwelt department at SPIEGEL ONLINE.
Again and again Seehofer
So why Seehofer?
He seems like a friendly, often a little overwhelmed, elderly gentleman, but that is deceptive: for years he has headed a ministry whose fundamental content orientation often no longer seems to be compatible with liberal democracy and the rule of law.
Horst Seehofer is dangerous.
Don't you think so?
Let's start with Hans-Georg Maaßen.
You already know: the former President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, who couldn't find it so bad when avowed Nazis marched through Chemnitz, stretched his arm in the Hitler salute when a Jewish restaurant was attacked there and people were rushed through the streets.
Maaßen, whose office at the time actually had the task of keeping right-wing extremists in check, but who apparently never really wanted to do so, should then leave.
Who really wanted them to stay?
Right, Horst Seehofer.
Jokes about Merkel
The fact that Hans-Georg Maaßen was a submarine from the far right at the head of the domestic secret service is what he is cracking jokes about himself on Twitter today.
He recently tweeted a picture of himself next to Angela Merkel with the comment: "Back then, before she knew who was standing next to her." There was a lot of applause and laughing smileys from Maassen's new target group.
Otherwise, he likes to tweet links to favorite contact points of the New Right, cryptic racism, food for corona and other conspiracy theorists.
He finds a lot of things "interesting!", For example articles in which he himself is quoted on the question: "How much GDR is there in today's Federal Republic?"
As a reminder: Under Maassen's aegis, the role of the protection of the constitution in the context of the NSU's terror murders could not really be clarified, under his aegis, the service simply lost sight of the right-wing extremist murderer of Walter Lübcke.
When the voices got louder to finally throw Maaßen out, Horst Seehofer said that Maaßen was a "competent and honest employee", but in the end he had to fire him and was not allowed to make him State Secretary.
That went a bit far
At the time, the dispute almost broke up the government.
One of Seehofer's favorite activities is to lead the government to the brink because of positions he himself considers "conservative".
Do you remember his "master plan" on migration?
Or in Seehofer's public joy that 69 people were deported to Afghanistan on his 69th birthday - five of whom are now back here and have good jobs?
Now that Maaßen no longer sympathizes with the AfD's positions within the protection of the constitution, but rather outside, the protection of the constitution - if the Cologne administrative court allows it - can finally do what it should have done a long time ago: observe the AfD.
Permanent erosion of fundamental rights
Unlike Maaßen, Horst Seehofer is still in office.
You might think that he hardly does anything there, but that's not true: While his ministerial colleagues fail serially in combating the corona crisis, Seehofer is tinkering with his ministerial officials on the permanent erosion of fundamental rights.
This week, a paper that was confirmed to be authentic was made public, a wish list from Seehofer's ministry on the amendment to the Telecommunications Act (TKG).
This once again contains a demand that Seehofer's people in China or Belarus must have copied: "Telecommunications services should be obliged to collect and verify identification features and, in individual cases, to make them available to the security authorities."
Identification required for the Internet, the hundredth
In concrete terms, this means that anyone who wants to use Internet services for communication, including those that do not depend on numbers, should in future have to show the operator an ID card beforehand.
The Ministry of the Interior is proposing that all German citizens in future have to give companies such as Facebook, Google or Telegram their full name, age and address and identify themselves in the event that the police are interested in it at some point.
How do you find that?
At its core, this is an old fantasy of secret services and law enforcement agencies: to turn this annoying internet, which has made the work of overgrowth so much harder, into an optimal system for total surveillance.
Gigantic name and address directories for countless companies included.
The Ministry of the Interior as an insecurity authority.
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Christian Stocker
We are the experiment: Our world is changing so breathtakingly that we stagger from crisis to crisis.
We have to learn to manage this tremendous acceleration.
Publisher: Karl Blessing Verlag
Number of pages: 384
Publisher: Karl Blessing Verlag
Number of pages: 384
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The internet is potentially totalitarian
The Internet, see China, is always a potentially totalitarian tool.
Seehofer would like to finally be able to use it that way.
This demand is so ludicrous (even members of the Union publicly distanced themselves from the paper) that "Internet politics", for example, probably not wrongly suspect that it is only a bargaining chip in the ministerial paper (the constitutional court, which already declares the much more harmless data retention to be unlawful would cash in this draconian measure quickly anyway).
Decentralized low-cost NSA
There are other seemingly extreme demands in the paper, for example that service providers should in future be obliged to "divert the data stream for the security authorities or provide the necessary assistance" so that these authorities can use spy software on the computers of target persons if necessary can smuggle in.
It's an NSA fantasy because the US secret service has been doing this for a long time, albeit with its own shadow infrastructure.
The process is called "Quantum Insert" there.
Seehofer's ministry now wants to install a kind of decentralized low-cost NSA with the support of companies in the middle of Germany.
All open.
The man, who at the time found Hans-Georg Maaßen "honest and competent", is trying to coax a totalitarian, obviously unconstitutional reorganization of the Internet into a public distracted by Corona - by the way, already in at least the second attempt.
Even these attempts are so indecent that one would have to say by now at the latest: enough.
Dismiss Horst Seehofer.
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