Germany's Federal Constitutional Court and the Regulation of GPS surveillance

In its recent decision of April 12, 2005, Germany's Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) addressed concerns that advances in the technologies of surveillance will erode fundamental rights. Though it rejected the petitioner's call to limit use of the Global Positioning System (“GPS”) to track the movements of suspects, the Court did warn that surveillance technologies working in tandem posed privacy risks that were greater than the sum of each one working alone. The Court required investigators from different agencies and states to coordinate their activities and disclose all ongoing surveillance when seeking judicial approval of additional methods and technologies. It likewise cautioned the Bundestag (German Federal Parliament) to monitor advances in surveillance technology and to develop new statutory safeguards that would protect personal data by limiting the use of more powerful innovations. Yet the Court's opinion left many questions unanswered. It did not explain how legislators or investigative agencies could avoid unnecessarily and intrusively multiplying the use of surveillance, given the overlapping jurisdiction of intelligence agencies with state and federal police. And insofar as the German Strafprozessordnung (Criminal Procedure Code – StPO) regulates only those modes of surveillance that produce criminal prosecutions, statutory suppression remedies have no clear impact on the investigative use of surveillance for purely preventive or intelligence-gathering purposes. My essay will explore the implications and limitations of the Court's opinion with an eye on analogous American law (introduced to gain a comparative perspective.)