A new form of surveillance requires telephone providers to scan the internet behaviour of all customers. Further details are secret.
In September, the German broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk uncovered a previously little-known surveillance method: IP catching. On Tuesday, netzpolitik.org published internal investigation files that show how this technology is used. Internet access providers are obliged by the authorities to monitor their customers’ connections in real time. The aim is to find out who is contacting a particular server.
Police or secret services can thus also identify people who use anonymous services such as the Tor network, which is distributed across thousands of servers. In the only documented case to date, such a Tor server at the German internet host Hetzner was monitored. The aim was to identify those responsible for the child pornography platform ‘Boystown’.
The telephone provider Telefónica and its German subsidiaries were obliged to collect all connections to this server – the so-called traffic data – for three months. The order from the Public Prosecutor General’s Office in Frankfurt am Main, which is responsible for internet offences, was approved by the city’s district court. All of Telefónica’s 44 million mobile phone customers were potentially affected.
Many experts interviewed by netzpolitik.org had never heard of ‘IP catching’. The method is not legally defined, the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor General’s Office confirmed to netzpolitik.org. According to the portal, investigators cite a Beck law commentary from 2016, written by a law professor and former head of department at the Bavarian Ministry of Justice, as the basis for their use.
Other experienced and prominent legal experts, however, do not believe that IP catching is covered by any current laws and cite the wide range of the measure, in which millions of uninvolved persons are monitored in order to – in the case of “Boystown” – track down a single individual.
In fact, Telefónica also had to record the content data of the connections in the documented case – but according to the court, this was only stored for a short time and immediately deleted again. However, it remains unclear exactly how this works technically. Allegedly, only the traffic data was transmitted to the authorities.
How often IP catching is used also remains unclear. Deutsche Telekom states that it has not carried out any such measures in the last five years. Vodafone refuses to comment, while Telefónica merely confirms that a court order is necessary. The Public Prosecutor General’s Office in Frankfurt am Main is also unable to say how often it has applied for such measures – on the grounds that there is no regulation requiring the deployment to be recorded.
In response to a parliamentary enquiry, the Federal Ministry of the Interior replied that the Federal Police had not carried out any IP catching measures in the last five years. The BKA, which used IP catching in the ‘Boystown’ case, refused to answer any questions. The German government classifies all information on the secret services as ‘classified’.
The questioner Clara Bünger criticises this response behaviour, especially as it is an incalculable encroachment on fundamental rights. The Left Party MP is calling for ‘a fundamental, fundamental rights-friendly reorganisation of the law enforcement authorities’ digital intervention powers’.
In the case of ‘Boystown’”’, the IP catching was actually successful: The administrator of the platform was identified and sentenced to ten and a half years in prison. Whether the investigation would have been fruitful without this intrusive surveillance measure is an open question.
Published in German in „nd“.
Image: In the case of Telefónica, all 44 million mobile phone customers were potentially affected by the surveillance method (Scott Rodgerson, Unsplash).
