When asked about employing mass surveillance, in particular also spying on Journalists, Doctors and Lawyers, the previous German government replied, that it is fine if we do it. After all we are not like Russia, China or Saudi Arabia, so those people have nothing to fear…
If we could power the earth from Orwell turning in his grave, we would have solved cliamte change long ago.
There is a regular governmental press conference, usually monday, wednesday and friday where the speakers of the chancellor and the ministries are invited by an independant journalist organization. The organization is called Bundespressekonferenz.
Since about ten years the journalist Tilo Jung is recording most of the press conferences and uploading them to his youtube channel I highly recommend you to watch the latest video on the massacre in Gaza. The current government called it an “tragic use of shooting weapons”.
I cannot find the specific video right now, because the topic of mass surveillance through automated scanning of messengers, or by allowing back doors has been a topic since at least the past 5 or 6 years. Please note that i was refferring not to this but the previous german government, albeit the current chancellor party SPD was also in the previous government and the chancellor Scholz was the last finance minister under Merkel.
If you believe my statement to be implausible without video evidence, i’d like to invite you to meet our former minister of defence in the current government, Lambrecht, who resigned after referring to the war in Ukraine as an opportunity to have met many nice people in a social media video. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64288267
Before she was defence minister under this goverment, she was minsiter of justice under the previous government. There she demanded that all websites should hand passwords over to the police as demanded. When it was pointed out that there is no use with hashed passwords, she asked to just safe them in plain text then. Alongside where further demands for extensive backdoors, violation of encryption and automatic scanning. It took months of heavy criticism to get her to drop it, despite the main point being that most of what she proposed was in violation of other laws including EU regulation.
https://netzpolitik.org/2020/hacker-interessieren-sich-nicht-fuer-stopp-schilder/
https://www.heise.de/news/Justizministerium-WhatsApp-Gmail-Co-sollen-Passwoerter-herausgeben-muessen-4615602.html