Datenschutz, the defense of law, and the debate over precautionary surveillance: The reform of police law and the changing parameters of state action in west Germany

This essay uses the development of police law in the 1970s and 1980s to assess the extent to which new forms of police surveillance were transforming a state based on the rule of law into a postliberal preventive or precautionary surveillance state. It argues that Datenschutz served as the primary means for theorizing the problems with new surveillance practices and defending both the idea of law and a liberal economy of informational restraint against the transgressive logic of precautionary surveillance. However, liberal principles were never abandoned completely, and at the turn of 1990s police law was shaped by the unresolved conflict between two competing conceptions of the role of the state.