Germany: Common database links secret service and the police
01 January 2007
Since the terrorist attacks in Madrid in 2004, Germany's bi-annual Interior Ministers Conference has repeatedly attempted to merge the police and secret service databases with relevant legislative proposals. The Lower House of Parliament finally passed the Common Databases Act (
Gemeinsame-Dateien-Gesetz) on 15 December 2006.
The law contains five articles. The first introduces an "Anti-Terror Database" holding personal data on terrorism suspects; it will be located in the offices of the Federal Crime Police office (
Bundeskriminalamt – BKA). Access is given to the 16 regular regional police offices, the Federal Police Department, the internal secret services that are comprised of the federal and the regional offices "for the protection of the constitution" (
Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz – BfV
and Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz), the external secret service (
Bundesnachrichtendienst – BND), the Military Secret Service (
Militärischer Abschirmdienst – MAD) and last but not least, the Customs Investigation Bureau (
Zollkriminalamt - ZKA). Article 1, creating the database, also gives powers to extend access to other police departments if they carry out anti-terrorism tasks "not only on an individual case basis". Apart from being able to access this database, all participating authorities are obliged to enter data relating to anti-terrorism already held on their databases as well as all newly collected data.
Four categories of persons can be entered into the database. Firstly, members or supporters of terrorist organisations who are either active in Germany with connections abroad or who are active abroad with connections to Germany. Secondly, members or supporters of a "grouping" that supports a terrorist organisation, in other words, supporters of supporters. Thirdly, persons who use politically or religiously motivated violence as well as those who "support, prepare, endorse or through their doing deliberately generate" such acts of violence, the latter explicitly refers to so-called hate preachers. Finally, contact persons, where facts support that this contact is not incidental or that information could be gathered which could lead to intelligence gathering on (
Aufklärung) the fight against international terrorism. Apart from personal data, associations, objects, bank details and telecommunications traffic data such as addresses, telephone numbers, internet sites and e-mail addresses can be entered. In all these cases "actual leads" must exist that show a connection between the first two categories of personal data.
The problem with these data categories is that their definition is vague and that police and secret services are now obliged to enter and therefore share any data they collect that "relates" to any of the above-named categories. The law is also a free pass for data collection because the definition of "relevance" here lies not in clearly defined regulations but rather in the eye of the beholder, in this case the police and secret service. "Leads" are defined as "actual" when, "according to intelligence or police experience, they justify the evaluation that the findings will contribute to the knowledge on (
Aufklärung) or fight against international terrorism". The widest possible definition was chosen here, which, moreover, makes anti-terrorism activity first and foremost a "preventative" activity that does not take actual suspects as its starting point but internal police evaluations on what in their eyes constitutes possible supporters of terrorism, or supporters of the supporters.
It is not surprising then that the type of data collected on persons is not only their names, address, physical features, spoken dialects and photos, but also their religion, membership of organisations, and details on places they visited, their telephone numbers, cars, etc., the latter enabling research on a persons' social circles. Finally:
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