25 people are already employed at a German surveillance centre that has been unused for years. They are now being financed through compensation. It remains unclear when it will start operating.

After further massive delays in setting up a bugging centre for the states of Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg, Thuringia and Berlin, high compensation payments are now being made to the institution. As the office of this ‘Joint Competence and Service Centre’ (GKDZ) announced at the request of “nd”, the contractual partner Ipoque GmbH is paying ‘damages and compensation payments in the millions’ until the centre becomes operational. The Saxon Ministry of the Interior had already announced such an arrangement for the current year 2025.

As a ‘central service provider’, the GKDZ is to carry out all forms of operational telecommunications surveillance for police authorities in the participating states. This includes traditional wiretapping of telephone and internet connections as well as sending silent text messages to locate mobile phones. The recorded data is forwarded to the requesting police station via a dedicated server.

The centre has its headquarters in Leipzig and a back-up facility in Dresden. A total of 40 people are to be employed there, including staff from state criminal investigation centres. The launch of the GKDZ was originally planned for 2018, but was delayed due to coordination problems between the governments of the five federal states. To operate the centre, they founded a public law institution and signed a state treaty.

A Europe-wide tender was then held in 2021, which was won by the Leipzig-based company Ipoque. It is part of the Munich-based surveillance service provider Rohde & Schwarz since 2011. Just one year after the contract was awarded in 2022, the company announced that it was ‘unable to deliver the software owed as agreed’. The main reasons cited were ‘programming difficulties’ and personnel problems. Additional delays were caused by the coronavirus pandemic and the lockdowns imposed at the time, as well as the switch to working from home.

For the first time, the funding federal states do not have to make any financial contributions for the current year 2025, as the compensation payments from Ipoque cover the entire operating costs. The GKDZ already employs 25 people. Their salaries are also paid by Ipoque, a spokesperson for the centre told ‘nd’.

The business plans of the GKDZ are classified and are not published. It is therefore not possible to verify the exact costs incurred and the extent to which these are actually covered by Ipoque’s recourse. What is known, however, is that the federal states involved provided around €15.8 million in start-up funding in the first two financial years of 2017 and 2018. Berlin and Saxony contributed the largest shares with over 4 million euros each, followed by Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia.

The GKDZ is still not specific about a commissioning date: the delay is expected to last ‘several years’. However, according to the office, Ipoque is making ‘good progress’ and has already put a test system into operation at the centre.

Despite the years of delays, the GKDZ does not foresee any problems with outdated technology when the interception centre is launched in a few years’ time. The hardware will be called up ‘as required’ from framework agreements. Memory modules, for example, have not yet been purchased in full size. Because existing technology is financed by the compensation payments, it is possible to ‘build up state-of-the-art IT infrastructure and software as required and keep it up to date’.

‘Financially, the GKDZ is obviously turning into the disaster we feared,’ says Niklas Schrader, domestic policy spokesperson for the Berlin left-wing parliamentary group, to ‘nd’. The German capital also operates its own telecommunications monitoring centre, which has been extended every year since 2016 at a ‘considerable cost’, he says. However, Schrader is also critical of the GKDZ, as the relocation of surveillance to Leipzig makes parliamentary and civil society scrutiny more difficult.

Rico Gebhardt, domestic policy spokesman for the left-wing parliamentary group in Saxony, believes that the savings will only have a temporary effect. Before the GKDZ becomes an investment ruin, the Ministry of the Interior should ‘develop an exit option’.

Published in German in „nd“.

Image: An ancient interception device from Rohde & Schwarz, to which Ipoque belongs since 2011.