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Nothing doing? Taking stock of data trawling operations in Germany after 11 September 2001

01 May 2005

by Martina Kant

After 11.9.01, nationwide data-trawling operations based on profiling (Rasterfahndung*) led to the collection and classification of personal data from around 8.3 million people. This infringed the constitutional data protection right to "self-determination about personal data" (Grundrecht auf informationelle Selbstbestimmung) of every tenth inhabitant of the Federal Republic of Germany. What for? That the Rasterfahndung was accompanied by failures and mishaps is revealed in a classified report of by Federal Crime Police Authority (Bundeskriminalamt - BKA).

"The aim of detecting more "sleepers" in Germany has not been achieved yet", concludes the BKA Commission for State Security in their evaluation, which is still classified [1]. The BKA's Commission for State Security was assigned to analyse the experiences of regional data-trawling operations and the so-called consolidation of information (Informationsverdichtung) or data comparison, carried out by the BKA after 11.9.01. A reading of the evaluation not only allows for a reconstruction of events but also reveals the extensive problems encountered during implementation. The conclusions drawn by the BKA do not point towards a decline in these operations, but the contrary: the future of data protection rights appears to be bleak.

Flashback: eight days after the horrendous attacks in New York and Washington, the Berlin and Hamburg interior authorities were the first to authorise data-trawling in search of alleged terrorist "sleepers". The chief public prosecutor had refused to initiate a nationwide database trawl based on the Criminal Procedural Act (Strafprozessordnung). Introduced by the regional states (Bundesländer), it was based on the police hypothesis that Germany was harbouring more anonymous potential "Islamic" terrorists who were planning attacks. Criteria for data collection by profile, or so-called grids, were defined on the basis of evidence the security services had collected on some of the Hamburg cell around Mohammed Atta. Other regional states started with slightly different criteria. The Coordination Group on International Terrorism (KG IntTE) [2] was created on 26 September 2001 and its "Sub-Working Group Grid" was responsible for establishing uniform criteria to be applied at the national level: age: 18-40, male, (former) student, resident in the regional state the data was collected from, religious affiliation: Islam [3], legal residency in Germany and nationality or country of birth from a list of 26 states with predominantly Muslim population, or stateless person or nationality "undefined" or "unknown". This data was to be collected by regional authorities on the basis of their respective police regulations from the databases of registration offices (Einwohnermeldeämter - EMÄ), universities/polytechnics and the German database on foreigners, and the Central Foreigners Register (Ausländerzentralregister - AZR). A problem arose immediately as Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony had no powers for data-trawling in their police regulations; Bremen had abolished the relevant powers in August 2001 with the reform of its police regulation. This "shortcoming" was, however, remedied by 24 October [4].

Data on those persons who appeared in all three databases (EMÄ, Uni, AZR) and who met the criteria were passed on by the regional authorities to the BKA. Their data was stored there - as so-called "base stock" - in a specially created database on "sleepers" called "Verbunddatei Schläfer". However, some Länder did not follow the grid pattern. Data that obviously did not correspond to the profile had to be "sorted out" by the BKA, "partly automated but in large part manually". The "sleeper" database contained almost 32,000 data entries that corresponded to the criteria, (see table below). Also, from the BKA's perspective, the so-called "investigation cases" (Prüffälle<

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