I can tell you, germany feels like it’s descending in some 1984-esque state at the moment, if you are somewhat involved in IT / “the internet”.
There is planning for computer surveillance, where the police can basically install a trojan on your computer and spy on everything you are doing. It’s meant to be a measure against serious crimes and terrorism and such, but as everything in this direction it will probably be used as some standard measure against everybody who is remotely suspicios within the year.
The “Vorratsdatenspeicherung” (Telecommunications data retention) is a law that forces ISPs to save all connection data (but not the content) for 6 months.
There is a law against so called “hacker tools”, that makes every software that can be used for malicious intent illegal - and put every security firm in germany (and most of the admins) on a very thin line between doing work and being criminal.
Now there is just a new law called “Gesetz zur Erschwerung des Zugangs zu kinderpornographischen Inhalten in Kommunikationsnetzen” (yeah, I know, and it’s every bit as ridiculous as it sounds). It forces ISPs to block websites that have child ponography content on a DNS-level. Now thats a good intention of course, but this law an the technical implementation is pretty useless - there is nothing done against the site itself, just its access from germany is blocked. Assuming the potential consumer has no idea how to use a different DNS server. And befor the law was even passed, there were several politicians who wanted to use the same mechanism for anything from copyright issues over “hate speach” to violent computer games. In the end, it just puts a stop sign in front of the site. This has raised a lot of controversies of course, but as usual the “but who will think of the children” argument trumps everything. (I am all for doing something against child pornography, like every same human on earth, but this law is useless. It does not help any child, it does not stop any molester, but provides a very dangerous censoring infrastructure and gives people a false sense of accomplishment. The police legaly has to take action against such sites anyway as soon as they know they are there)
It feels like german politics has completely disconnected from any person younger then, say, 35. The people in power either don’t understang anything about the way people use computers, the internet and modern media at all, or they just don’t care. Some political active people like to call them “old grey men with ballpoint pens”, which about sums up their technical understanding of the modern world.
In this context, after every school shooting here in germany there is an outrcy that Something Needs To Be Done. Nobody really cares what, nobody has any idea why there was a shooting, but Something Needs To Be Done. So they use any scapegoat they can get. Heavy metal is too 80’s (heh), so they use “Killerspiele” (killer games) as the idiotic cause of all evil today. As the vast majority of germanys male teenager play this games (and I guess about everybody whos male and online tried them), it’s pretty easy to use them as a blame. Never mind that most of the psychological evidence points against the causal connection between the shooting and the game, but most voters (being too old) just doesn’t understand this hobby at all, so the see that Something Is Done. And all is well. They also used shootings to get political momentum for harsher gun laws, even though there really wasn’t need for that.
I’m rambling, sorry, but yeah, germany is pretty much batshit insane when it comes to things like this. Our Minister of the Interior and quite a few others are doing what they can to erode our freedom and our rights for whatever reason people are conveniently afraid of at the moment. And thats the way all of Europe seems to go right now.