German anti-crime bill fuels snooping debate

BERLIN, June 4 (Reuters) - The German government decided on Wednesday to give police more rights to monitor homes and phones, fuelling a heated debate about privacy laws in a country shocked by a snooping scandal at Deutsche Telekom.

Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said the new draft law, still to be approved by parliament, would strengthen the means available to Germany's Federal Crime Office (BKA) to investigate terrorist suspects and fight international crime.

"The threat to our country has made it necessary to give the BKA such rights to counter threats," Schaeuble told a news conference presenting the so-called BKA law.

The draft law extends police rights to conduct online searches, video surveillance of homes and phone monitoring.

Opposition politicians and rights groups said the new law would further curb privacy rights at a time when many Germans were highly sensitive to data protection questions due to the snooping revelations at Deutsche Telekom.

"This is the 'best of' the surveillance state's catalogue," Claudia Roth, head of the opposition Greens, said.

"All of Mr Schaeuble's security fantasies have been pushed through. We need resistance to that. I don't want us to be a state in which everyone is suspicious," she told TV station N24.

Data protection and privacy are sensitive issues in a country haunted by memories of domestic spying by the Nazi Gestapo and communist East Germany's Stasi secret police.

Deutsche Telekom has acknowledged it illegally monitored phone call records in 2005, after a magazine said management spied on directors and journalists to find out who was leaking information to the press.

German prosecutors are investigating Telekom and the government has called the spying "unacceptable".

Lawmakers at Germany's Bundestag lower house of parliament are to debate the Telekom case later on Wednesday.

Opposition politicians say the Telekom case highlights wider concerns over new anti-crime rules, which since the beginning of the year require telecom firms to store phone data for 6 months.

A recent forsa poll showed 48 percent of Germans considered the data storage a necessary means to fight crime, while 46 percent said it was disproportionate and unnecessary hindrance to rights of freedom.

Schaeuble rejected criticism of excessive state interference. "The constitutional state works," he said.

"The protection of the personal private sphere in our system ... is no lower than in any other part of the world and it's higher than it's ever been at any other time in our history. I'm proud of that and working for it with great determination." (Reporting by Kerstin Gehmlich)