The German coalition government wants to extend the surveillance rights of the police to include facial and voice recognition on the internet in a fast-track procedure. This should enable networks of suspects to be revealed more quickly.
The planned expansion of police surveillance powers in Germany goes far beyond the facial recognition discussed so far. In addition to the automated analysis of image material, the police are also to be authorised to carry out voice recognition on the internet in future. This is contained in a draft law that has now been published. According to the bill, various biometric data of suspects should be able to be compared with data from social media and other sources on the internet.
The aim of the “law to improve the fight against terrorism” is “in particular to identify and localise suspected terrorists and suspects”. The authorities also want to obtain information about “accomplices or backers” in this way. The use of voice recognition on the internet would make it possible to automatically analyse audio data from online videos or podcasts, for example, and search for voice samples of suspects.
However, this would only be possible in the case of serious criminal offences and subject to judicial approval, as is the case with telecommunications surveillance. To this end, a new section on the comparison of biometric data is to be added to the Code of Criminal Procedure and other Police Acts are to be amended.
Further requirements for the biometric comparison are that “the offence is also serious in the individual case” and “the establishment of identity or the determination of the whereabouts would otherwise be considerably more difficult or futile”. Once the investigation has been completed, the data should be deleted.
Real-time recognition of live streams or recordings from webcams, for example, is to be excluded, meaning that the comparison is to be carried out retrospectively. However, it is questionable whether this requirement would not already be met by storing the material or delaying the analysis by a few seconds.
The new police powers are part of a “security package” with which the German government has reacted to the deadly knife attack in Solingen on 23 August. However, it is doubtful whether the attacker could have been stopped using facial recognition. The widespread use of the technology in real time is problematic in terms of fundamental rights, says Dennis-Kenji Kipker, Professor of IT Security Law at Bremen University of Applied Sciences.
The “security package” also includes a proposal to tighten the asylum law. According to the magazine “Heise Online”, both laws were forwarded to the parliamentary groups of the coalition government (Social Democrats, Greens, Liberals) as a so-called formulation aid. This enables an accelerated legislative process by allowing the parliamentary groups to submit their own drafts. The opinion of the Bundesrat (the Federal Council of the 16 Länder), which is also required, can thus be bypassed.
The bill on biometric matching will be debated in the Bundestag for the first time tomorrow. The haste may be due to the upcoming state elections in Brandenburg on 22 September. Following the election defeats in Thuringia and Saxony, the government parties apparently want to demonstrate its ability to act on the issues of terrorism and migration by expanding surveillance.
Published in German in „nd“.
Image: “Voice Recognition” by diongillard (CC BY 2.0).
