Federal Trojan: BKA to be allowed to break into homes and spy on IT

Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser (SPD) wants to give the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) the power to secretly enter and search homes in future to combat terrorism. This should make it easier for investigators to install the federal Trojan for secret online searches and source telecommunications surveillance on IT systems such as smartphones or computers. According to the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland and the taz newspaper, this is the result of the draft amendment to the BKA law, which has so far been the focus of criticism primarily due to the planned permission for biometric facial recognition.

Source tapping allows the police to intercept ongoing communication via messengers such as WhatsApp, Signal or Threema directly on a target system before it is encrypted or after it is decrypted. In the case of more extensive online searches, officers can also access stored files. As a rule, state Trojans must be used and security vulnerabilities exploited for both instruments. However, there are often problems with the remote installation of such surveillance software if target systems are effectively protected against external attacks. The Federal Ministry of the Interior's draft therefore states that the BKA must be able to "physically access the IT devices". This is the "technically safest and quickest way to implement" the federal Trojan without the "involvement of the target person".

According to the reports , the draft law provides for the right of entry and the associated powers as a last resort (ultima ratio) and requires judicial approval in individual cases. The aim could also be to replace possible "means of crime" before planned attacks or to render them unusable. The approach is not entirely new: the state parliament of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania already passed a reform of the police law in 2022, which includes a "right of entry" for law enforcement officers for online searches.

Faeser opposes coalition agreement

In 2019, the then Federal Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer wanted to amend the law on the protection of the constitution to allow state security officers and BND agents to secretly enter homes to install federal Trojans on end devices. Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU) had already called for a debate on this in 2008 as Federal Minister of the Interior. In 2018 , the justice ministers of the federal states argued in favor of a right of entry to obtain state Trojans on devices to be monitored. For years, the BKA did not make use of its authority to hack IT systems. However, investigators from the agency are said to have used spyware against a network of Reich citizens in 2022. The federal Trojan initially built by the BKA itself at a cost of 5.77 million euros was only suitable for source tapping. A more powerful version was long in the making. At the same time, the office procured the FinSpy state Trojan.

The Faeser draft, which was not agreed within the federal government, also does not match the new point in the coalition agreement of the traffic light coalition. It states: "We are setting the intervention thresholds high for the use of surveillance software, including commercial software." The existing powers for the police are to be adapted in such a way that the requirements of the Federal Constitutional Court for online searches and the core area of private life are always respected. Konstantin von Notz, deputy leader of the Green parliamentary group in the Bundestag, referred to "serious times". The BKA needs "modern investigative powers and resources". At the same time, these could "only exist within the framework of the constitutional order". The Federal Constitutional Court had set clear guidelines here. The draft law should be examined with this in mind. DJV Federal Chairman Mika Beuster criticized: "Secret break-ins are reminiscent of the methods of police states, but not of liberal democracies."

(vbr)