Status: 09.03.2023 2:59 p.m
Five East German federal states are building a joint police interception center in Leipzig. But the project is delayed – and could be much more expensive than planned.
If you walk down the long corridor of the Leipzig monitoring center, you will pass doors with the coats of arms of five eastern German states: Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, Brandenburg and Berlin. There is a single room for each country. Employees of the monitoring center are said to be sitting there. But at the beginning of this year, the rooms were still deserted – although they should have been in operation for years.
The “Joint Competence and Service Center in the Field of Police Telecommunications Surveillance”, GKDZ for short, is located on a police site in the north of Leipzig. At some point the GKDZ was only called the monitoring center. The name has been set ever since.
Shared data center
The monitoring center is an institution under public law and is intended to ensure telecommunications surveillance even in times of messenger services. The plan: The five federal states pool their resources with the joint data center, have the new technology developed in the network and ultimately save money. Because the countries still maintain their own data centers.
In concrete terms, the police forces of the federal states are to make inquiries to the GKDZ in the future, which in turn will request the data from the telecommunications companies. At the interception center, the data should be processed centrally and in turn forwarded to the police.
2021 becomes 2024
The first rough planning for the monitoring center dates back to 2013. Four years later, the countries involved then concluded a state treaty and formed an institution under public law. The system for monitoring telecommunications should actually start operating in 2021 at the latest.
On MDRThe state of Brandenburg, which currently chairs the administrative board, recently announced that the gradual implementation and commissioning could take place “according to current plans” in 2024. However, this also “depends on the performance of the market”. If there are further delays in delivery, it could take even longer.
Hardware and software problems
GKDZ CEO is Ulf Lehmann. He had dem MDR announced in November that all structural requirements regarding the server rooms for the data centers had been completed. “The further timeline depends not insignificantly on the delivery times for the required hardware, which are currently difficult to calculate,” explained Lehmann.
It’s not just the hardware that’s lacking. The GKDZ managers also have to be patient with the software. According to a spokesman for the Brandenburg Ministry of the Interior, the technical implementation phase for telecommunications surveillance is currently underway. So the software is still being worked on.
Exact costs have not been published since 2018
The expenses for the project are already high. For the years 2017 and 2018 alone, the participating federal states paid a total of almost 16 million euros. The participating countries have been providing the funds since 2017 – divided according to a modified Königstein key.
However, it is not publicly available how much money the project has cost since then and what financial resources the federal states will probably have to invest in the construction before it can go into operation. Because the exact business plan from 2019 is classified as classified information and may not be published.
If you want to find out what the project costs, you have to take a detour. Because some of the financial contributions come from the budgets of the federal states.
Saxony is the most transparent about it and has presented figures for all years – including for the 2023/2024 double budget. In the current and coming year, the Free State has estimated around 3.6 (year 2023) and around 3.9 million euros (year 2024) respectively. From 2017 to 2024, Saxony will therefore be investing a total of almost 20 million euros in setting up the joint monitoring center.
View of a server room at the Joint Competence and Service Center (GKDZ) in Leipzig
Image: picture alliance/dpa
Monitoring center could cost around 70 million euros
But how much will the construction of the GKDZ cost in total between 2017 and 2024? The Ministry of the Interior in Brandenburg, which is currently in charge, referred to one MDR-Inquiry at the end of last year that not all Europe-wide award procedures had been completed. It is therefore not yet possible to make any valid statements regarding the total costs. Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg and Berlin called on MDR-Request any exact cost for any year.
But with the proportionate figures for all states for the years 2017 and 2018 and the known proportion of Saxony for all years up to 2024, one can approximate the theoretical total costs – provided that the percentage distribution of the first two years of development is still used.
The figures from Saxony then show the costs that would be incurred by all five federal states involved for the construction of the GKDZ by 2024: more than 70 million euros. Although the Königstein key, which determines which country pays how much, has changed slightly since 2017, this should not have had a major impact on the total. The GKDZ did not want to confirm the sum of around 70 million euros.
An external company had estimated the investment costs for the GKDZ in 2013 in a rough plan at 15.8 million euros. It is unclear whether ongoing personnel costs were also covered.
Topic in the interior committee
Due to the delays in the commissioning of the GKDZ, parliamentary pressure could also increase. Sebastian Striegel is the domestic spokesman for the Greens parliamentary group in the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt. He said that MDR, the project currently shines through delays and lack of transparency. At the request of the Green Group the internal committee there is dealing with the GKDZ today.
A look at northern Germany shows how difficult it is to set up a central infrastructure for telecommunications surveillance. A similar project is running there with the participation of Lower Saxony, Bremen, Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The project, located in Hanover, started in 2016 and should be completed in 2020. The system is not yet in operation. At the beginning of 2023, the “Bild” newspaper quoted a spokesman for the Lower Saxony State Criminal Police Office as saying that “no valid statement could be made about the start of active operation”.