BKA chief Münch "eagerly" awaits new data retention law

In their coalition agreement, the CDU, CSU and SPD have agreed to reintroduce data retention limited to IP addresses and port numbers, which has already repeatedly failed in the Supreme Court. The President of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), Holger Münch, can hardly wait. "We are eagerly waiting for this to become law," explained the chief investigator in an interview with the Frankfurter Rundschau (FR). The reason he gave: "The IP address is often the only way to determine from which device a crime was committed."

"In the case of child pornography, for example, i.e. images of sexual abuse, the BKA receives over 200,000 reports a year," Münch explained. More than half of these are criminally relevant under German law. "We then try to trace which computer or mobile device was used for these more than 100,000 reports." With the current maximum period of seven days, "we can solve a good 40 percent of the crimes via the IP address. With more effort, we can manage another 35 percent using additional data –." The criminal prosecutor is confident: "In future, we will be able to be much more successful here."

The head of the BKA has no data protection concerns. The encroachment on civil rights is "extremely minor", he claims. The BKA does not collect the IP addresses itself, but requests them from the providers if necessary. Münch has been campaigning to politicians for years for "data retention limited to child pornography".

The traffic light wanted Quick Freeze

During a debate between the CDU/CSU and SPD in the Bundestag in December, the only point of contention was how long IP addresses should be stored. The Bundesrat is campaigning for a "minimum retention period" of one month for Internet identifiers to combat serious crime. The CDU and CSU went one step further with their own draft bill: they pushed for the three-month logging of IP addresses and port numbers without cause as well as more options for radio cell queries, aka cell phone dragnet searches.

The SPD now supports this approach in the coalition agreement. During the "traffic light" period, things looked different. Former Federal Minister of Justice Marco Buschmann (FDP) presented a counter-proposal for the freezing of traffic data in cases of suspicion early on and stuck to it until the end. The federal government actually agreed on this quick-freeze approach, but Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser (SPD) in particular did not want to accept it. The previous grand coalition had repeatedly made a belly landing with its legislative decisions on data retention.

The three-month period is comparatively short, says Federal Data Protection Commissioner Louise Specht-Riemenschneider. "But I still see contradictions with national and European case law," she emphasized to the FR. Even the BKA assumes "that the success rate no longer increases significantly above a storage obligation of two to three weeks". A court could be guided by such studies and come to the conclusion that an absolutely necessary period should not go beyond this.

Protest from data protectionists and civil rights activists

Specht-Riemenschneider's predecessor Ulrich Kelber voiced more fundamental criticism in an interview with heise online in the summer: According to him, data retention is "a variant of permanent surveillance. I have to expect that everything I do or don't do will be stored, evaluated and put into a different context." This happens regardless of whether someone has done something illegal. It is "not compatible with a liberal democracy in the long term if someone is always looking over your shoulder".

A relevant surveillance measure limited to IP addresses also creates "a huge possibility of corresponding profiling" and is therefore problematic, Kelber warned. Above all, times would be demanded when the possible gain in knowledge would only be extremely minimal. In principle, the European Court of Justice has repeatedly rejected data retention without cause. However, according to recent rulings by the Luxembourg judges, the general and indiscriminate retention of IP addresses may be permissible "for the protection of national security, the fight against serious crime and the prevention of serious threats to public security for a period limited to what is strictly necessary".

The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) recently called for an "emergency brake on the surveillance catalog in the coalition agreement". It sees mass surveillance at several levels, including telecommunications data. Civil rights organizations such as the Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte (Society for Civil Liberties) and the SPD-affiliated network policy association D64 also fear that data retention and automated big data analyses, which Münch also advocates, will cause a great deal of damage to fundamental freedoms.

(nen)