Exclusive
Status: 03/21/2022 12:13 p.m
The Federal Criminal Police Office has been criticized for not having footage of child abuse removed from the internet. The federal government is now justifying this. The opposition and child protection organizations are outraged.
If an investigator from the Federal Criminal Police Office comes across images of child abuse in a pedo-criminal Internet forum, he must not have them deleted – even if this were possible quickly and easily. The federal government made this astonishing statement in response to a request from the left-wing faction panorama and STRG_F (NDR/radio) present. Accordingly, the BKA has no legal basis for deletion on its own initiative.
With the statement, the federal government is defending the BKA against criticism to which the police authority has been exposed for months. The trigger was research by Panorama and CTRL_F, who had shown that huge amounts of photos and videos could be removed from what is currently the world’s largest pedocriminal Darknet forum. To do this, the content that is stored on the network by storage services only has to be reported in order to have it deleted. However, the BKA does not take this step.
“Unsurpassed in cynicism”
The government’s view is met with criticism. This is how Julia von Weiler, who works with the organization “Innocence in Danger” for digital child protection, was opposite panorama surprised by the answers of the federal government. The fact that the police leave crimes they know of online is “to be honest, the cynicism cannot be outdone.”
The member of the Bundestag Anke Domscheit-Berg from the left faction, who had asked the parliamentary question, also reacted with incomprehension. The fact that the BKA does not even try to notify the storage services “shocks me,” said Domscheit-Berg. She demands that “all state investigative authorities, including the BKA explicitly, have all such depictions of violence that become known to them through the investigations deleted.”
Illegal recordings stay online for years
The previous practice of not deleting raises fundamental questions about the sustainability of investigative strategies pursued by the BKA in cooperation with the responsible public prosecutor’s offices. In April 2021, the BKA and the Frankfurt am Main Attorney General shut down the Darknet platform “Boystown” and arrested four alleged backers. But they failed to stop the illegal content from spreading.
Because while “Boystown” was on the dark web and was taken off the web, the photos and videos shared on the platform, which document severe sexual abuse of children, were only linked. The recordings were on the web with ordinary storage services that knew nothing about them – and were not informed by the investigators either. A few days later, the pedo-criminal scene uploaded a copy of “Boystown” to the Internet, making thousands of photos and videos available again.
“Boystown” server for months at the BKA
It is curious that the BKA should not bear any responsibility for this practice, as the federal government is now suggesting: After panoramaBKA officials have been evaluating the confiscated “Boystown” servers for months – and as early as 2009, the Bundestag’s scientific service determined that the BKA can inform internet companies in Germany and abroad if it finds “child pornography” on their servers .
However, the federal government is now making it clear that the BKA may only delete data on the instructions of a public prosecutor. The BKA itself only conducts investigations into pedo-criminal platforms “in exceptional cases at the request and under the direction of a competent public prosecutor in individual cases”, but the question of whether and when recordings are deleted there must also be answered by a public prosecutor. This wording suggests that the responsibility for the breakdown in the “Boystown” case should lie solely with the Attorney General’s Office in Frankfurt am Main. The BKA shut down “Boystown” with the local Central Office for Combating Internet Crime (ZIT).
Differences between the BKA and the public prosecutor’s office
The Central Office for Combating Cybercrime and the Federal Criminal Police Office have actually been considered natural allies in the fight against child abuse for over a decade. The glitch in the “Boystown” case and the handling of the resulting consequences have caused differences in Allianz for months, which the federal government is now fueling with the statement.
The Frankfurt ZIT, which has now been publicly blamed for these non-deletions, referred to a request panorama-Interview from December. At that time, the ZIT prosecutor Julia Bussweiler, who specializes in investigating child abuse, said that her authority did not pursue any deletions of links as part of investigations, because this was “a preventive police task”. That means: That is a matter for the BKA.
Seehofer still considered deletions to be “essential”
It is politically remarkable that the Federal Ministry of the Interior, which answered the left-wing faction’s small question, so clearly denied that the BKA had any competence in the subject of deleting “child pornography”. In November, the then Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said at the autumn conference of the BKA that the deletion of the recordings was “essential”: “The image and video material must under no circumstances be permanently available online. Otherwise, those affected will become victims again and again. And though for a lifetime.”
Successor Nancy Faeser, on the other hand, has not yet publicly commented on the subject of child protection. Also one panorama-The Federal Ministry of the Interior has so far left unanswered a question as to whether it wanted to provide the BKA with the missing legal basis.