Recently, the so-called 15-kilometer rule has come into effect in some German states for so-called corona hotspots, i.e., areas with a 7-day incidence value of 200 infections per 100,000 inhabitants. This means that people in these areas are not allowed to travel more than 15 kilometers from their place of residence. As always, exceptions to this rule are, for example, commutes to work.

Uwe Brandl, President of the Bavarian Municipal Association, is now demanding that the police be authorized to track cell phones in order to control the measure.

He formulates this demand for a further attack on democratic rights quite openly when he says that one must "simply have more courage to use the digital possibilities" and decide whether health protection or data protection is more important.

Well, the situation is simply difficult, so we need more police state.

The fact that the legality of the 15-kilometer rule is highly questionable doesn't seem to bother him.

Obviously, this move also serves to further enforce the state of emergency and to increase the psychological terror against the masses. In addition, the police naturally know how to use movement profiles in a targeted manner and what is once introduced "because of Corona" by no means has to disappear again with the pandemic.

Even the Federal Data Protection Commissioner rejects the measure, but not because data protection is such a matter close to his heart. He merely points out that acceptance of the Corona warning app could suffer from such measures and that tracking cell phones is too imprecise anyway.

So tracking is basically okay, it just doesn't go down too well, and besides, you'd have to be able to do it more precisely somehow.