UPDATE 1-German anti-crime bill fuels snooping debate
(Adds quotes, details from parliamentary debate)
BERLIN, June 4 (Reuters) - The German government decided on Wednesday to give police more rights to monitor homes and phones despite uproar over a snooping scandal at Deutsche Telekom.
Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said the 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.
Last week, Deutsche Telekom 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. German prosecutors are investigating.
Opposition politicians and rights groups said the law would further curb privacy rights.
"This is the 'best of' the surveillance state's catalogue," Claudia Roth, head of the opposition Greens, said. "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.
This year German authorities also opened an investigation into discount chain store Lidl after allegations that it employed detectives and used cameras to spy on staff.
The government called the Deutsche Telekom affair "unacceptable". Opposition lawmakers said in a parliamentary debate that the Telekom case also had political roots.
"What we're seeing at Telekom and Lidl...is also the consequence of policies hostile to basic rights, which you have conducted," Gisela Piltz from the Free Democrats said, accusing the grand coalition of Social Democrats and Christian Democrats.
Petra Pau from the far-left Left Party said the Telekom case highlighted problems linked to new anti-crime rules which, since January, require telecom firms to store phone data for 6 months.
"The more data being registered, the greater is the danger of things derailing," she told parliament.
A forsa poll showed 48 percent of Germans considered the data storage a necessary means to fight crime while 46 percent said it was a disproportionate hindrance to rights of freedom.
Schaeuble rejected criticism of excessive state interference and warned lawmakers of fuelling people's fears.
"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," he told the news conference. (Reporting by Kerstin Gehmlich; Editing by Robert Woodward)
