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?
However...
https://netzpolitik.org/2013/500-millionen-verbindungsdaten-...
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?