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It's related to the COVID data gathering in a quite simple way: the government is telling the people gathering this data helps containing the disease and that they can be trusted to not abuse that data. This trust however is severely undermined by a lot of factors, like past abuses which came out due to Snowden, the continued push to collect data with claims of fighting terror or other crime - and, in my opinion, also extreme difference in transparency that politicians ask from citizens versus the transparency they themselves will commit to. The two cases were the former minister of defense, von der Leiten, and the current minister of transport, Scheuer. Both wiped their cellphone data although they knew that there are ongoing investigations. The investigations are called "Untersuchungsausschuss" - not sure how to correctly translate that. They are not criminal investigations, although they could to them, but basically a group of members of parliament investigate into affairs to find out if criminal misconduct happened or off processes need to be improved. In case of von der Leien, there were large amounts of money going to consultants, with some contracts not following the legal processes to give them out. In case of Scheuer, there is a completely bitched toll project, which is costing the taxpayer 500 millions, where there are clear sings of him if ignoring risks to be seen as a quick actor to help with an election, as well as giving information to one of the bidders for the contract. I don't trust politicians like that to only use the collected data for the given purpose and I don't trust them to stop the collection after the crisis is over. That's how, in my opinion, these topics are related. |