on the other hand. As threatening situations are not international in the narrow sense
but result from offensive acts committed by individuals, both aspects form an integrated whole. Thus, in the complainant’s opinion, the Federal Intelligence Service becomes, contrary to the competencies conferred upon it by law and contrary to the
separation of competencies between the police and the secret services established
by the Constitution, a secret police investigation agency concerned with internal security to such a degree that it encroaches upon fundamental rights.
As concerns the extent of monitoring, the complainant argues that it must be assumed that, contrary to the opinion of the Federal government, the numerous monitoring facilities for radio signals emitted by satellites, radio systems and microwave
radio systems allow, in the case of fully automatic filtering of the recorded material,
the comprehensive monitoring of all accessible international radio and telecommunications traffic operations. Whether this possibility will be realised only depends on the
procurement of the required facilities and equipment. It is not possible to restrict the
so-called strategic surveillance to specific threats, in relation to specified telecommunications links, whether defined locally or otherwise.
54
The complainant alleges that in the three-stage procedure set forth by the Federal
government, which includes general screening (preliminary recording or buffering),
term base inquiry and more detailed evaluation of the recorded material, each of the
three stages shows in itself the characteristics of an encroachment upon fundamental
rights. The two first stages of the complex of activities, which the complainant alleges
to constitute an encroachment, namely (1) the screening and recording of the act of
telecommunication and (2) the term base comparison, affect the holder of fundamental rights without any suspicion of a criminal offence or any threat emanating from that
individual. The relevant law does not presuppose any further suspicion of a criminal
offence or of a threat which goes beyond the general possibility that the sources of
the threats indicated in the law make use of telecommunications technology.
55
The intensity of the encroachment upon fundamental rights is increased, according
to the complainant, in the case of all acts of telecommunication which contain search
terms. They are evaluated, i.e. surveyed with a view to their content, by the staff of
the responsible agency. From the complainant’s perspective, this procedure completely eliminates telecommunications privacy. The technical prerequisites for a
computer-aided term base comparison, which the Act assumes, do not exist as yet.
This means that it is not possible to enforce the Act in compliance with the Basic Law.
Nor is evaluation motivated by suspicion. The use of a specific semantic system,
which is applied as a search term comparison, cannot in itself establish a threatrelated or criminal offence-related initial suspicion. The complainant contends that it
is an inherent characteristic of the computer search method that it also extends to
many holders of fundamental rights for whom there is no suspicion of illegal activity.
The complainant argues that this type of search is based only on suspected threats.
56
According to the complainant, the challenged provisions violate the principle of pro-
57
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