Nicolas Ziegler

Brief description of the doctoral project

While the permissibility of state surveillance measures receives a great deal of attention, the technical details of their implementation remain a marginal phenomenon in legal studies. My dissertation project aims to provide constitutional clarity on the use of zero-day vulnerabilities by state security authorities at the interface between police law, criminal procedure law and IT security law. On the one hand, these vulnerabilities, which are not yet publicly known, help the state to obtain information. On the other hand, their use weakens the general level of IT security. My dissertation is intended to provide an answer to the governmental dichotomy between ‘analogue’ and ‘digital’ security.