privacy
Majority of countries against data retention without cause
A storage system with more than a petabyte of capacity can be seen in a data center of the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office (BLKA). photo
© Matthias Balk/dpa
Many interior ministers regard retained IP addresses as indispensable for fighting crime. In the case of the judiciary, opinions are quite different.
With a narrow majority, the justice ministers of the federal states spoke out against the Union’s demand for data retention without cause for criminal prosecution on the Internet. On Thursday at their autumn conference in Berlin, the specialist ministers voted nine to seven in favor of a motion from Hamburg and Saxony, which favors the “quick freeze” procedure preferred by Federal Justice Minister Marco Buschmann (FDP).
“The lack of traffic data storage can prevent us from investigating crimes and, in some cases, stopping child abuse that is still ongoing. Anyone who refuses to store traffic data is slowing down our investigators,” said the chairman of the conference of justice ministers, Bavaria’s department head Georg Eisenreich (CSU).
On the other hand, Hamburg’s Justice Senator Anna Gallina (Greens) emphasized that the “Quick Freeze” procedure should initially be understood by the authorities as an additional instrument in the fight against crime, which could bring legal peace after years of uncertainty. Therefore, it is a real step forward, even if the ideas of the countries differed widely.
Frozen only at certain times
With the quick freeze procedure, telecommunications providers are obliged to store data on individual users for a certain period of time if there is an initial suspicion – to “freeze” so to speak. However, this should only be possible in the case of serious crimes such as manslaughter, extortion or child abuse. In addition, a judge must approve the measure. For example, the storage of data from a specific radio cell around the crime scene or the location data of the mobile phones of a victim’s close relatives is conceivable.
“We are united by the massive fundamental rights concerns about the planned chat control,” said Buschmann after the conference. Digital civil rights are not second-class civil rights. It is an important signal that the conference of justice ministers now welcomes the “Quick Freeze” procedure as a solution that protects fundamental rights and conforms to the constitution instead of data retention of IP addresses. “We mustn’t lose any time here and should give investigators the new tool quickly.”
Buschmann submitted his draft proposal for the “Quick Freeze” process at the end of October and again presented it as an alternative to storage of traffic data without cause. Federal Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD) and several state interior ministers had repeatedly stated that, in their view, the procedure was not sufficient to get the IP addresses that are important for criminal prosecution.
“Presenting the model as a real alternative is either deliberate window dressing or ignorance. Where there is no data, nothing can be frozen,” stressed Eisenreich.