organised. The parliament is free to choose the manner it regards as the most suitable, always provided that it adequately takes into consideration fundamental rights.
One aspect of adequacy is that the controls cover each step of the process of
telecommunications monitoring. The legitimacy of an encroachment upon telecommunications privacy, as well as the compliance with the legal regulations for the protection of telecommunications privacy, must be controlled.
Finally, as the screening and recording of telecommunications traffic and the use of
the information thus obtained is bound to specific objectives, the obtained data must
be destroyed as soon as it is no longer required for the specified objectives or for legal protection by recourse to a court.
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c) Constitutional jurisprudence has not yet clarified how far the geographical range
of the protection provided by Article 10 of the Basic Law extends. The Federal government assumes, though it remains an open question, that the constitutional protection of Article 10 only applies if there is a sufficiently close relationship to the territory
of the Federal Republic of Germany. This interpretation leads to the conclusion that
the Article 10 protection neither extend to foreign telecommunications traffic nor to
persons living abroad. This question has not arisen in this way before because state
power, as a general rule, could only be exercised on the territory of the state. Generally, the borders of the state were at the same time the borders of state power. Only
the development of technology has made it possible for the state to extend its activities to the territory of other states without having to be physically present there in the
shape of representative entities. In particular, the use of satellites permits, inter alia,
the monitoring of acts of communication conducted outside Germany without a physical connection to that foreign territory.
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The starting point of the answer to the question about the territorial scope of Article
10 of the Basic Law is Article 1.3 of the Basic Law, which determines the scope of the
application of the fundamental rights in general. The fact that this regulation provides
that the fundamental rights bind the legislature, the executive and the judiciary in a
comprehensive way, does not, however, result in a final determination of the territorial
scope of application of the fundamental rights. The Basic Law does not content itself
with defining the internal order of the German state but also determines the essential
features of the German state's relationship to the community of states. In this respect,
the Basic Law assumes that a delimitation between states and legal systems is necessary, and that co-ordination between states and legal systems is also necessary.
On the one hand, the scope of competence and responsibility of organs of the German state must be taken into account when determining the scope of application of
the fundamental rights (cf. BVerfGE 66, p. 39 [at pp. 57 et seq.]; BVerfGE 92, p. 26
[at p. 47]). On the other hand, constitutional law must be co-ordinated with international law. International law, however, does not, in principle, preclude the validity of
fundamental rights in matters that bear on relations with foreign countries. The territorial scope of the fundamental rights, however, must be drawn from the Basic Law itself, taking into account Article 25 of the Basic Law. When doing so, modification and
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