"What is at stake here is trust," says the Financial Times Deutschland from Hamburg. "Not only citizens' trust in their state, but also consumers' trust in the digital media. If people trust their country less, that is a threat to democracy. That is the biggest danger. The state is committed to protecting its citizens from crime, but also to protecting them from the state itself."

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung agrees that the state's data storage policies destroy "a society's confidence in the impartiality of communication." The state reserves the right to push aside citizens' rights, the paper says. Gone is the security of knowing that they will be left in peace if they have done no wrong. "The security agencies have the freedom of no longer having to consider protected rights. Where does that leave the freedom of the press, the protection of informants, if police and state prosecutors can for six months find out who was in touch with whom?"

Too much data is stored for too long a time. And too many agencies have access to sensitive information, comments the Frankfurter Rundschau. It is, the paper says, an infringement of "the right to informational self-determination. Or, to put it in simple terms, it is utterly unconstitutional."

Does the state really have to know everything about everyone, asks the Ostsee-Zeitung. "Must 100 million cell phones be monitored in order to catch maybe three dozen radical Islamists exchanging crackbrained messages? No one denies that some crimes leave a trail in the world of the web. But the state's blanket targeting of all its citizens goes much too far. Who can guarantee that the sensitive data is only accessible to state authorities?"

But, writes the Leipziger Volkszeitung, the Karlsruhe Constitutional Court's thoroughness in the matter is in stark contrast to the carelessness with which people give up personal information. "It starts with shopping with a customer card, and putting private photos on the internet isn't the last of it. People who act in such a naive and often unrestrained manner really have no cause to get all steamed up about clearly regulated state controls."

The Volksstimme Magdeburg points out that a constitutional state is determined by the fact that it will always carefully weigh up its surveillance technology potential against the individual citizen's basic right to freedom. "That is the fine but crucial difference to a police state," the eastern German paper concludes.

The Rhein-Neckar Zeitung has German editorial reaction in a nutshell: knowing when a European buys a book on the internet, clicks on medical pages, or gives his grandmother a phone call "is none of the state's business."

db/dpa/AFP
Editor: Trinity Hartman