Germany's Interior and Justice ministries last week struck a deal on a set of new provisions regarding the fight against serious crime and terrorism; the anti-terror update, pushed by Germany's top security official Wolfgang Schaeuble, the interior minister, would allow police to not only wiretap suspects' apartments, but also install mini-cameras that secretly videotape what happens inside an apartment.

The wiretapping of private conversations is also to be allowed, Schaeuble said. Listening in on private conversations is illegal; prosecutors have to shut off their recording machines once conversations touch the private realm; police have long complained that this makes efficient surveillance impossible.

The new provision would also allow the surveillance of an innocent person's home if suspects visit there. Add to that the possibility of installing spy software on a suspect's personal computer, and you have the key elements of the new BKA law that has most lawmakers in Germany fuming.

"The measures that are to be legalized here remind me of states that are not democracies," Renate Kuenast, the head of the German Green Party, told Monday's Berliner Zeitung newspaper. She said people should be worried "about civil rights in Germany."

Kuenast had already bashed the provisions last week, adding her party will oppose the bill once it gets to Parliament.

"Schaeuble wants to construct a security state where everyone is a potential criminal," she said last week.

Erhart Koerting, Berlin's interior minister, told German news magazine Der Spiegel he was against the visual surveillance measures included in the bill. Such measures would probably not make it past Germany's highest court, the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, observers say.

The court in the past years has been the biggest hurdle for Berlin's anti-terror plans, with several anti-terror moves being thwarted by judges who argued that they undermine people's basic rights. Experts expect similar reactions once the law is challenged.

"I can't imagine that this law holds up in its current form before the Constitutional Court," Ulrich Battis, a Berlin-based law expert, told the Berliner Zeitung.

And then, of course, there is Germany's Parliament. Expect most opposition lawmakers to block the bill if the German government refuses to weaken some of its key parts.

That likely won't go down well with Germany's conservative politicians: Erwin Huber, one of the heads of the conservatives in Bavaria, wants the bill to include the possibility for federal investigators to secretly enter a suspect's home and install spy software on his or her computer.

Entering a suspect's home is "absolutely necessary" to fight serious crime and terrorism, Huber said last week.

Germany's Cabinet will pass the security bill by July or August, officials said. It will then move to Parliament, probably in October or November, where lawmakers have to sign off on it.

Germany has so far been spared of a terrorist attack, but officials on repeated occasions arrested people accused of having plotted major bombings.

related report
Britain fires warning on rise of cyber-hackers
More than one in 10 big British businesses has detected computer hackers on their IT networks, a government report said Tuesday, warning of a rampant rise in such activity.

Thirteen percent of large businesses have detected unauthorised outsiders, said the study drawn up by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, published at the Infosecurity Europe show in London.

That represents a 10-fold increase in the last two years, warned the report.

"Very large companies remain the main target for hackers and 20 percent detect hundreds of significant attempts to break into their network every day," it said.

"Eighty-five percent of very large businesses were attacked. Telecoms providers are most likely to be attacked, three times as likely as average."

According to the hacking community, only a tiny proportion of penetrations are detected by network owners, the report added.

"Large corporations are being actively targeted by hackers, often working in cahoots with organised crime, and looking to steal confidential customer data which can be used for identity fraud," Chris Potter, the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) partner who led the research, told the Financial Times newspaper.

The report also found that 96 percent of companies with more than 500 employees were affected by security breaches.

The average cost of the worst breach of the year was 15,000 pounds (30,000 dollars, 19,000 euros) for small businesses and 1.5 million pounds for very large businesses.

Two thirds of companies were doing nothing to prevent confidential data leaving on USB memory sticks, while four-fifths of companies that have had computers stolen have not encrypted their hard drives.

Companies were urged to start taking preventative rather than retrospective action.

Britain's Business Minister Shriti Vadera said: "New technology is a key source of productivity gains, but without adequate investment in security defences these gains can be undermined by IT security breaches."

"The survey shows increasing understanding by business of the opportunities and threats, but challenges remain."

Data security has been a hot topic in Britain since the personal details of roughly half the population were lost by a government department in the post last November. They remain missing.

The survey urged businesses to learn more about the security threats they faced, target security investment at the most beneficial areas, integrate security into normal business behaviour, deploy integrated technical controls and respond quickly to breaches.

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