The explanation is deceptively unclear, IMO. What's being authorized is court-ordered searches of a type that were previously prohibited, even for courts to authorize, by strict privacy laws. The US has always had the power to conduct these searches [0]; the "inviolability of the home" human dignity concept doesn't exist in the US. (I'll defer to German people to explain this concept).
As explained in heise.de[1] (in German) about a parallel law being enacted in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern,
> "For the online search, the deputies now also grant the law enforcement the right to secretly enter and search apartments with judicial permission."
It's so frustrating that every other comment in this thread is people giving their pet opinion about the headline and what it means about the state of the world / the inherent authoritarianism of Germany / whatever, and nobody else is commenting on the contents.
The controversial measures the article lists are things like:
> Police may now install state-developed spyware, known as trojans, on personal devices to intercept messages before or after encryption. If the software cannot be deployed remotely, the law authorizes officers to secretly enter a person’s home to gain access.
> The revised law also changes how police use body cameras. Paragraph 24c permits activation of bodycams inside private homes when officers believe there is a risk to life or limb.
Those seem like... pretty reasonable things for the police to do, presuming it has a warrant? And if the law authorizes doing these things without warrants, maybe the article should have lead with that?
Ctrl+F-ing "warrant" in the article doesn't give me any result, which makes me feel this article isn't very serious.
> the "inviolability of the home" human dignity concept doesn't exist in the US.
Maybe not under that term, but for example, almost the only place an American's 4th Amendment protections against search and seizure apply is in their home. Law enforcement can search their garbage at the curb, monitor their [edit: public] movements via camera and license plate monitoring, etc., look them up online, all without warrants [*]. They can't do that in someone's home.
[*] I'm pretty sure no warrant is required to search curbside trash or do most online research.
I think the "inviolability" thing is useful just to understand what's actually happening here, but it's also important to understand that the US and Germany have very different criminal justice, search, and evidentiary systems. Germany doesn't have an exclusionary rule for evidence, for instance.
Is this even practical anymore? A non-technical person can set up video surveillance on their home for a couple hundred bucks. Why wouldn't a criminal do that? I think the days of the FBI planting a microphone in a lamp on Tony Soprano's basement are over.
The boundaries of your "home" varies by State. For example, in some States the interior of your car is part of your home even when not at home, which occasionally has entertaining implications.
This article is not about warrantless searches of homes, though. In America, courts can and do order the police to secretly enter a domicile and install surveillance devices.
hehehe, this made me chuckle. 25 years of hard-core socialists running the show, and all of a sudden its the conservatives that ruined Berlin. that is rich. It's even funnier when considering the Länderfinanzausgleich (Equalization payments between federal states): Basically within those 25 years Berlin, under those financially savvy and responsible leftists, amassed 95 B € in payments from all other German Federal States. [0]
Calling it "German authoritarianism" risks thinking it's a localized phenomenon or special case. But it seems more like a regression to the global mean. Most of these expansions are things that have been on the front page of HN, but in reference to the US: cell tower queries, facial recognition, license plate harvesting, long detention periods without being charged, etc.
>Calling it "German authoritarianism" risks thinking it's a localized phenomenon or special case.
It very much is though. Plenty of other countries in EU like France or Romania for example but probably many more, don't have even remotely as many authoritarian and invasive BS laws as Germany does.
But the worst part is that Germans have gaslit themselves to think that their authoritarian laws are there "for their own protection". They don't even realize they have a problem, until they move and live abroad and learn you can run a country without your government have so many surveillance and speech control powers.
German history and culture was always about following rules and following a strong figure of authority, whether that be someone with a toothbrush moustache or someone making diamond hands.
Spit balling now ... I just feel like the years have rolled on by so quickly now, that we've aged out of all of the lessons we had to learn before. And now we're going to have to learn them all over again.
Classical liberalism is a rare blip of an exception in the history of civilization. As Milton Friedman says, and I paraphrase, it's quite remarkable it happened in the first place, but there's no real guarantee those conditions might ever arise again and no real expectation that it's realistic to think it will be recreated again in any particular desired timespan.
So is most technology, widespread literacy, health, freedom, etc. In fact, everything since we were nomadic hunter-gatherers is a blip - should we go back to that? The argument makes no sense; what force is compelling us to go back to hunting and gathering? It's absurd to raise this argument for inevitability, rather than do something about it - which has worked overwhelmingly for generations.
I'm not arguing you shouldn't do something about it. I'm a bit of a dreamer myself; I've basically carved out a life in a super rural area with almost no government -- but at the same time I like to be aware of the thoughts of great philosophers like Friedman and the history of this sort of liberalism and use it to my advantage. Knowing what I've stated has allowed me to deal with a world where I can't expect things to get better, even if I hope they will.
My personal take is you can use Friedman's thoughts to your advantage. Be prepared that everything will get much worse. And then maybe you can organize your life to minimize your interaction with the state in case your efforts don't help.
The idea that these are dreams is just part of the anti-democratic, anti-freedom rhetoric. You might not mean it that way, but look how it's been absorbed widely.
These are concrete realities that have swept across every corner of the world, and brought, by orders of magnitude, the greatest expansions of human freedom and prosperity ever. All in reality, not a dream.
we ought to stop these decadent crooks from plunging us into fascism and war just to rescue their waning privilege (again), but somehow i don't think we will. so, yeah, lessons to be relearned ahead.
I wonder why so many governments have such high anxiety right now. They're all acting like the sky is falling. Don't they know what happens to most of the chickens in Chicken Little?
In a nutshell, the sovereign debt crisis. If you don't realize there's a sovereign debt crisis (ongoing across years), or even more accurately, a wide variety of sovereign debt crises, or even more accurately, a wide variety of debt crises of both sovereign and private entities, well, your governments and some of the more government-adjacent private entities have bent a lot of resources into make sure that's the case and convincing that it's just peachy when they borrow money, if not outright a boon, without regard to how much they borrow or how much they've already borrowed. They may have convinced you that this is true, but they know better.
Whatever happens and however it resolves, there aren't a lot of options where they retain as much power as they have now for very long. (Even if the top people maintain control they're going to be cutting loose a lot of lower level elites because they'll have to because they won't be able to maintain their upkeep.) The wheel turns and we're in that phase where they're still in power, but have begun to feel their decline. Human psychology fears and feels loss much more keenly than gain and they both fear and feel a lot of loss of power underneath the veneer they maintain.
Perhaps its because people are realizing a lot of economic and financial activity is kind of useless for anything besides pumping the numbers of stocks and valuations and a larger fraction of money is going towards the already wealthy while the majority are losing out. And when financial bubbles start popping and economies fall flat on their faces there is going to be a lot of angry people.
People saying eat the rich and posting guillotines and supporting socialist redistribution ideas use to be kind of edgy and fringe, but now it is gaining popular appeal again, and it makes people with wealth or political power scared.
Several reasons. For one we've broken the climate and poisoned our habitat, this will for sure cause major problems for existing power structures. We're not sure when, just that it will, eventually. There will be massive amounts of refugees and unemployment, as well as strongly argued and broadly supported demands for accountability.
For another we've definitely decided to not put effort into international law and instead run with a might-makes-right kind of ethics in international relations. One sign that this was the case was the US repeatedly perpetrating the crime of aggression in the early 2000s, another was the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno Karabakh/Artsakh in 2023, as well as ongoing genocidal and similar campaigns in e.g. Sudan, DR Congo and likely the Caribbean and/or South America in the future. Ukraine is yet another example. Currently China is probably the last major country to heavily prioritise money and trade over atrocities and tribute.
Then there's the future of technology. Software has been treading water since the seventies while at the same time promising to deliver some utopian revolution anytime now. Sometimes it's promised to war machines, like GOFAI often was, sometimes it's promised to the general public, usually it doesn't deliver outside of making either legal conflict (i.e. commerce, political participation and the like) or illegal conflict (i.e. mafia, non-parliamentary/autonomous political participation, and the like) and the state response more efficient and intense.
Some in power expect computers to replace labour on a massive scale sometime soon, in part because that's a promise that has been made. Some also expect computerised fake persons and marketing-adjacent technologies to finally make democratic ambitions impossible to realise. It's also expected that people will have to be kept in their place for other, more mundane reasons.
Climate protests, anti-genocide protests and so on show that people are still willing to put themselves in harms way for some ethical purpose and hope for a decent future. This is very scary if you're a contemporary world leader, because there is this harsh disconnect between the stories you tell yourself and others in a similar position about what you do and how you're perceived by your constituents. Basically they think they're doing their best and that's admirable, and the rest of us think they're shit and deserve to be harshly punished.
There's also the spectre of history. Once upon a time ordinary people took a lot of power for themselves, and sometimes they just murdered their leaders. Dragged them out on a town square and chopped their heads off, or shot them or beat them with bamboo until they died. When the conditions look like it might be time for revolution and you're the one holding the levers of power you get scared. The might-makes-right-states are also scary, because those that haven't made the jump already don't have a bloc that backs them up, unlike the socialist states and the capitalist ones and the third world collective did way back when.
So, we're in a hurry to figure out how to make sure local populations cannot revolt, and next up is to figure out whether there are actually any allies or whether this is a war of all against all.
Life is a negotiation. What the populace brings to the table is they will vote harder next time or maybe a little bit of protests, but mostly just do what they're told and carry on with their jobs and pray things get better. What the government bring is fighter jets and guns and career civil servants who have had a lifetime of training how to fuck you, the might and wishes of the rich and powerful, and lording power by taxing you then redistributing it back as benefits that then feel depended upon.
If you enter the negotiating table with a sociopath and expect them not to steamroll you when you openly show you have far worse cards, then you're not thinking clearly. Insanity is thinking you can keep bringing the same things to the negotiation table and getting different results.
And as always, plenty of oil runs down that slope to make it slippery. First it's terrorists, then heavy crime, then petty crime, then small things, then it's whoever the powers that be don't deem deserving of freedom. We've been down that road on Germany, but history rhymes, as the saying goes.
Ironically, the same people who complain about "slippery slopes" become the same people who bemoan the fact that American, Chinese, Russian, and even Vietnamese [0][1] intelligence operate with de facto impunity in Germany and the EU.
Europeans can no longer afford to be the idealists that they were in the 2000s. Every country is runnng influence ops across Europe to a degree that hasn't been seen since the Cold War.
That said, as an American, it's fine for me if Germans and Europeans remain naive. An allied Europe is good, but a naive but controlled Europe is equally as good. For every Atlanticist, we have people who can push our interests in an illiberal manner like Dominik Andrzejczuk.
> Europeans can no longer afford to be the idealists that they were in the 2000s.
Always the arguments of the enemies of freedom and dignity - they are fanciful ideals, not necessities and the whole point, and the foundations of the freeest, most secure, most prosperous societies in history. Maybe the rest of Europe wants to live more like Russia?
The American framing of privacy and free speech absolutism doesn't hold much credence in Europe. And it's not like the US is much better in that regard.
We in the US are using free speech and privacy absolutism as a hammer against the EU's Digital Services Act, which they are using as a hammer against our dominance in the tech industry and our trade barriers against European exports.
For most European nations today, the degree of greyzone warfare is startling, and multiple near accidents have happened. And even with expanded police and intelligence powers like those used in Europe in the 2000s, most European nations would remain significantly freer than Russia ever was or is.
That's a strawperson, not a serious argument. The idea that the US is absolutist about privacy is laughable, even more when compared to Europe. Free speech is falling apart rapidly. Europe is the central advocate of human rights currently.
> Europe is the central advocate of human rights currently
The European definition of human rights doesn't include a maximalist approach to privacy. The primacy of the state the core bedrock in mainstream European thought, as can be seen with EU Charter Articles 7 and 8.
Hybrid warfare tactics such as those being used by Russia within the EU [0] along with other sorts of offensive intelligence operations would fall under the remit of an expansion of state enforcement and coexist with the EU Charter.
Furthermore, as I previously stated, this kind of empowerment of law enforcement and intelligence agencies was the norm across much of the EU (and still is in Southern and Eastern European member states) until the 2010s.
The big shift is that law enforcement now has to do their job, instead of trying to make tech companies do their job.
Even more important: The cost of surveillance this way is very high. It's not practical to perform massive surveillance this way, so it requires a reason for targeted surveillance.
Law enforcement and intelligence agencies across Europe were given de facto impunity due to Cold War era policies that were then rolled back in the 2010s.
In 2025-26, the threat profile that most European countries face is comparable in scale to what was the norm during the Cold War, except now most Western European intelligence and law enforcement agencies are not allowed to use the same tools they used to use barely 15 years ago.
As an American, it's fine for me if Germans and Europeans remain naive. An allied Europe is good, but a naive but controlled Europe is equally as good. For every Atlanticist, we have people who can push our interests in an illiberal manner like Dominik Andrzejczuk.
For every Vance, we got a Nuland, and American views on Europe began shifting all the way back in 2011 [0] (for all you guys who will spew the "Politico is Axel Springer" crap, this article is from 2011 - 13 years before the acquisition): "Europeans should be particularly concerned that a strong majority of Americans under the age of 45 now see Asia as more important than Europe" in 2011.
> The cost of surveillance this way is very high. It's not practical to perform massive surveillance this way, so it requires a reason for targeted surveillance
Not really. Data warehousing with cold/hot storage along with basic statistical analysis and inference has become cheap. And even local police departments can afford a $50k-$100k annual contract to work with red teams on bespoke exploit development.
The interesting thing is that the laws being created to protect against such extreme attacks will be used against the people when they are controlled by an extreme group.
That's how radicalization works, a pretty well-defined tactic as I understand it:
How do you get free, prosperous, safe people to give all that up for what you offer? It sounds almost impossible. You manufacture fear and division - look at terrorism, or the uses of demonization in many places - and then they may be willing to change.
Remember that Eisenhower said, 'the only thing we have to fear is fear itself'. Eisenhower, who led the militaries of West through arguably the greatest crisis in their history, who was leading the West through the Cold War. He knew crisis, and that is what he said. That's what genuine leaders do.
Those who use spread fear and radicalization are not after security and freedom, but after power.
Fair statement but it is generally accepted that extraordinary measures, like extraordinary claims require extreme evidence. That's just not the case here. To paraphrase Ben Frnaklin "Those who would give up liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." I think the corollary is that we actually get neither liberty nor safety.
Totalitarism slowly advancing in Europe. Recently I read an article about leftist groups and orgs being debanked. One of them is Huseyin Dogru, a Turkish/German journalist. German government acknowledges it, but can‘t see any problem with it as they hold the opinion that private banks can do whatever they want.
You are labelled „Putin versteher“ (someone who sides with Putin) or criticise Israel (in which case you are labelled antisemitic), and once you are labelled that way, you have fallen out of grace. And can be targeted or beaten on a demonstration brutally by police forces, or, debanked.
As explained in heise.de[1] (in German) about a parallel law being enacted in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern,
> "For the online search, the deputies now also grant the law enforcement the right to secretly enter and search apartments with judicial permission."
[0] e.g. https://www.npr.org/2011/08/02/138916011/home-visits-and-oth... ("Home Visits And Other 'Secrets Of The FBI'")
[1] https://www.heise.de/news/Mecklenburg-Vorpommern-Durchsuchun...
The controversial measures the article lists are things like:
> Police may now install state-developed spyware, known as trojans, on personal devices to intercept messages before or after encryption. If the software cannot be deployed remotely, the law authorizes officers to secretly enter a person’s home to gain access.
> The revised law also changes how police use body cameras. Paragraph 24c permits activation of bodycams inside private homes when officers believe there is a risk to life or limb.
Those seem like... pretty reasonable things for the police to do, presuming it has a warrant? And if the law authorizes doing these things without warrants, maybe the article should have lead with that?
Ctrl+F-ing "warrant" in the article doesn't give me any result, which makes me feel this article isn't very serious.
Maybe not under that term, but for example, almost the only place an American's 4th Amendment protections against search and seizure apply is in their home. Law enforcement can search their garbage at the curb, monitor their [edit: public] movements via camera and license plate monitoring, etc., look them up online, all without warrants [*]. They can't do that in someone's home.
[*] I'm pretty sure no warrant is required to search curbside trash or do most online research.
(FYI, you can escape * as \* to get it to display as *).
Especially when you exclusively enter and exit the car inside your garage! /s
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A4nderfinanzausgleich
It very much is though. Plenty of other countries in EU like France or Romania for example but probably many more, don't have even remotely as many authoritarian and invasive BS laws as Germany does.
But the worst part is that Germans have gaslit themselves to think that their authoritarian laws are there "for their own protection". They don't even realize they have a problem, until they move and live abroad and learn you can run a country without your government have so many surveillance and speech control powers.
Maybe we were removing the proverbal fences all the time and are about to learn the hard way to put them back.
My personal take is you can use Friedman's thoughts to your advantage. Be prepared that everything will get much worse. And then maybe you can organize your life to minimize your interaction with the state in case your efforts don't help.
The idea that these are dreams is just part of the anti-democratic, anti-freedom rhetoric. You might not mean it that way, but look how it's been absorbed widely.
These are concrete realities that have swept across every corner of the world, and brought, by orders of magnitude, the greatest expansions of human freedom and prosperity ever. All in reality, not a dream.
Whatever happens and however it resolves, there aren't a lot of options where they retain as much power as they have now for very long. (Even if the top people maintain control they're going to be cutting loose a lot of lower level elites because they'll have to because they won't be able to maintain their upkeep.) The wheel turns and we're in that phase where they're still in power, but have begun to feel their decline. Human psychology fears and feels loss much more keenly than gain and they both fear and feel a lot of loss of power underneath the veneer they maintain.
People saying eat the rich and posting guillotines and supporting socialist redistribution ideas use to be kind of edgy and fringe, but now it is gaining popular appeal again, and it makes people with wealth or political power scared.
For another we've definitely decided to not put effort into international law and instead run with a might-makes-right kind of ethics in international relations. One sign that this was the case was the US repeatedly perpetrating the crime of aggression in the early 2000s, another was the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno Karabakh/Artsakh in 2023, as well as ongoing genocidal and similar campaigns in e.g. Sudan, DR Congo and likely the Caribbean and/or South America in the future. Ukraine is yet another example. Currently China is probably the last major country to heavily prioritise money and trade over atrocities and tribute.
Then there's the future of technology. Software has been treading water since the seventies while at the same time promising to deliver some utopian revolution anytime now. Sometimes it's promised to war machines, like GOFAI often was, sometimes it's promised to the general public, usually it doesn't deliver outside of making either legal conflict (i.e. commerce, political participation and the like) or illegal conflict (i.e. mafia, non-parliamentary/autonomous political participation, and the like) and the state response more efficient and intense.
Some in power expect computers to replace labour on a massive scale sometime soon, in part because that's a promise that has been made. Some also expect computerised fake persons and marketing-adjacent technologies to finally make democratic ambitions impossible to realise. It's also expected that people will have to be kept in their place for other, more mundane reasons.
Climate protests, anti-genocide protests and so on show that people are still willing to put themselves in harms way for some ethical purpose and hope for a decent future. This is very scary if you're a contemporary world leader, because there is this harsh disconnect between the stories you tell yourself and others in a similar position about what you do and how you're perceived by your constituents. Basically they think they're doing their best and that's admirable, and the rest of us think they're shit and deserve to be harshly punished.
There's also the spectre of history. Once upon a time ordinary people took a lot of power for themselves, and sometimes they just murdered their leaders. Dragged them out on a town square and chopped their heads off, or shot them or beat them with bamboo until they died. When the conditions look like it might be time for revolution and you're the one holding the levers of power you get scared. The might-makes-right-states are also scary, because those that haven't made the jump already don't have a bloc that backs them up, unlike the socialist states and the capitalist ones and the third world collective did way back when.
So, we're in a hurry to figure out how to make sure local populations cannot revolt, and next up is to figure out whether there are actually any allies or whether this is a war of all against all.
Life is a negotiation. What the populace brings to the table is they will vote harder next time or maybe a little bit of protests, but mostly just do what they're told and carry on with their jobs and pray things get better. What the government bring is fighter jets and guns and career civil servants who have had a lifetime of training how to fuck you, the might and wishes of the rich and powerful, and lording power by taxing you then redistributing it back as benefits that then feel depended upon.
If you enter the negotiating table with a sociopath and expect them not to steamroll you when you openly show you have far worse cards, then you're not thinking clearly. Insanity is thinking you can keep bringing the same things to the negotiation table and getting different results.
Me neither, especially since the adults are back in charge in the US.
> If the software cannot be deployed remotely, the law authorizes officers to secretly enter a person’s home to gain access.
Clear Das Leben der Anderen vibes. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others)
However: As usual, the devil is in the details. How much suspicion is required, what's the process, etc. (I assume that a judge needs to sign off.)
Europeans can no longer afford to be the idealists that they were in the 2000s. Every country is runnng influence ops across Europe to a degree that hasn't been seen since the Cold War.
That said, as an American, it's fine for me if Germans and Europeans remain naive. An allied Europe is good, but a naive but controlled Europe is equally as good. For every Atlanticist, we have people who can push our interests in an illiberal manner like Dominik Andrzejczuk.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-25/berlin-ki...
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-18/vietnam-p...
Always the arguments of the enemies of freedom and dignity - they are fanciful ideals, not necessities and the whole point, and the foundations of the freeest, most secure, most prosperous societies in history. Maybe the rest of Europe wants to live more like Russia?
We in the US are using free speech and privacy absolutism as a hammer against the EU's Digital Services Act, which they are using as a hammer against our dominance in the tech industry and our trade barriers against European exports.
For most European nations today, the degree of greyzone warfare is startling, and multiple near accidents have happened. And even with expanded police and intelligence powers like those used in Europe in the 2000s, most European nations would remain significantly freer than Russia ever was or is.
That's a strawperson, not a serious argument. The idea that the US is absolutist about privacy is laughable, even more when compared to Europe. Free speech is falling apart rapidly. Europe is the central advocate of human rights currently.
The European definition of human rights doesn't include a maximalist approach to privacy. The primacy of the state the core bedrock in mainstream European thought, as can be seen with EU Charter Articles 7 and 8.
Hybrid warfare tactics such as those being used by Russia within the EU [0] along with other sorts of offensive intelligence operations would fall under the remit of an expansion of state enforcement and coexist with the EU Charter.
Furthermore, as I previously stated, this kind of empowerment of law enforcement and intelligence agencies was the norm across much of the EU (and still is in Southern and Eastern European member states) until the 2010s.
[0] - https://acleddata.com/report/testing-waters-suspected-russia...
Even more important: The cost of surveillance this way is very high. It's not practical to perform massive surveillance this way, so it requires a reason for targeted surveillance.
In 2025-26, the threat profile that most European countries face is comparable in scale to what was the norm during the Cold War, except now most Western European intelligence and law enforcement agencies are not allowed to use the same tools they used to use barely 15 years ago.
As an American, it's fine for me if Germans and Europeans remain naive. An allied Europe is good, but a naive but controlled Europe is equally as good. For every Atlanticist, we have people who can push our interests in an illiberal manner like Dominik Andrzejczuk.
For every Vance, we got a Nuland, and American views on Europe began shifting all the way back in 2011 [0] (for all you guys who will spew the "Politico is Axel Springer" crap, this article is from 2011 - 13 years before the acquisition): "Europeans should be particularly concerned that a strong majority of Americans under the age of 45 now see Asia as more important than Europe" in 2011.
> The cost of surveillance this way is very high. It's not practical to perform massive surveillance this way, so it requires a reason for targeted surveillance
Not really. Data warehousing with cold/hot storage along with basic statistical analysis and inference has become cheap. And even local police departments can afford a $50k-$100k annual contract to work with red teams on bespoke exploit development.
[0] - https://www.politico.eu/article/americans-turn-their-backs-o...
How do you get free, prosperous, safe people to give all that up for what you offer? It sounds almost impossible. You manufacture fear and division - look at terrorism, or the uses of demonization in many places - and then they may be willing to change.
Remember that Eisenhower said, 'the only thing we have to fear is fear itself'. Eisenhower, who led the militaries of West through arguably the greatest crisis in their history, who was leading the West through the Cold War. He knew crisis, and that is what he said. That's what genuine leaders do.
Those who use spread fear and radicalization are not after security and freedom, but after power.
Noone claimed it was an existential threat.
I think you also don't know what kind of evidence this new legislation requires.
Secret access to plant bugs is how the FBI beat the mafia in the US in many cases in the 80s and 90s. But there were strict rules.
You are labelled „Putin versteher“ (someone who sides with Putin) or criticise Israel (in which case you are labelled antisemitic), and once you are labelled that way, you have fallen out of grace. And can be targeted or beaten on a demonstration brutally by police forces, or, debanked.
https://creativetimereports.org/2013/06/25/surveillance-and-...