That isn't the point is it? The step forward here is that the comumunications between these providers is now encrypted by default and foreign entities such as the NSA will now have a harder job to do traffic and content analysis on German emails being sent to and from German nationals.
I don't have a problem with a German judge in a German court, granting a search warrant with reasonable grounds where all checks and balances are in place. I do have a problem with secret courts with secret laws and gag orders hiding this kind of thing from the public.
If foreign intelligence agencies are allegedly granted unhindered access to their servers then I see that as a scandal. Have you got any evidence to back up that claim?
In principle I agree with you and I think you are right considering what the police is allowed to do and what not. As far as I know, a judge still needs to sign a warrant for the police to do anything.
I would be really surprised if the BND wasn't using that same access infrastructure (admittedly as supposition on my part). Combined with the story on how the BND protects our data by removing email addresses that end on .de, this again becomes worst case-ish. Now this is only metadata, but at least in the case of email, processing the metadata means having parsed the message. Since the infrastructure is supposed to be set up in such a way that they get it from the server of the provider, encrypting the communication with said provider is kind of useless, at least in regard to the NSA.
I'd also like to add that your comment makes an important point. Most people, including me, are quite OK with law enforcement operating under the rule of law within clear boundaries in this realm. But how do we get the intelligence community from hitchhiking on the law enforcement infrastructure?
Google encrypts their email by default when exchanging with the majority of email providers (including, presumably, the German ones mentioned here, as long as they already support TLS).
Likewise even German law permits surveillance on foreign communications (see the "BND Section" of their legal code).
What this here is, is marketing. Not that it's bad marketing, but it doesn't solve any of the real issues.
I don't have a problem with a German judge in a German court, granting a search warrant with reasonable grounds where all checks and balances are in place. I do have a problem with secret courts with secret laws and gag orders hiding this kind of thing from the public.
If foreign intelligence agencies are allegedly granted unhindered access to their servers then I see that as a scandal. Have you got any evidence to back up that claim?