Germany's top court to rule on controversial data storage law
Frank Merlott
on the legality of data surveillance and storage. Rights activists and
police are at loggerheads over conflicting priorities.
Germany's highest court faces a tough choice on Tuesday after over 34,000
citizens, including the current Justice Minister Sabine
Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, filed a lawsuit against a two-year-old data
law.
The law allows authorities to require communications companies to store
telephone and Internet data for six months if it can help with police
investigations.
Critics argue that the arbitrary storage and surveillance of Internet and
telephone data infringes the privacy rights of the individual, a key
freedom in any democracy.
"Data relating to all communication channels - no matter whether this is
by telephone, mobile phone, or email, is being stored," says Dietmar
Mueller, press officer of the federal data protection authority in Berlin.
"It may be only the details of the connections, not the content, but this
still leads to vast data packages being held by the telecommunications
companies at the request of the authorities," he said. "Keeping these
large amounts of data always carries the risk that it may be used for
other purposes."
Small risk, huge benefits
But proponents of the law believe that this risk is negligible compared
with the law's benefits, saying it has been effective in preventing many
crimes, including terror attacks.
Konrad Freiberg, head of Germany's police union, is a staunch backer of
the data storage law.
"Take the Sauerland group, for example, which planned attacks in Germany,
or the terrible attacks in Madrid - in these cases, tracking down further
offenders was only possible thanks to the data storage measures," Freiberg
says.
But Mueller is not convinced that the law is as useful in foiling
terrorist attacks as the police say.
"Opinions differ here, especially with regard to how the Sauerland group
was uncovered," he says, "We shouldn't forget that terrorists also know of
the data storage measures and they are most certainly capable of finding
other ways to communicate with each other."
The original data storage law was already diluted by Germany's
constitutional court in March 2008, allowing access to the stored data
only for serious crimes such as murder or spreading child pornography.
Reassuring the public
Freiberg stresses that all surveillance operations require approval from a
judge and that the process is controlled by data protection authorities as
well as the entire chain of police command. But he understands why people
are concerned about what happens with their private data.
"I know how frightening technology can be. We have witnessed a lot of data
abuse by private companies." Freiberg says, "But I must stress that the
police has not let data be abused and there is judicial control at all
times. It's important that we eliminate people's fears so that we can
really protect them against crime."
So far Germany has been spared the terrorist attacks witnessed in other
European countries. But now it is up to the constitutional court to assess
whether data storage is as crucial as police say. The key question is how
far can crime prevention measures go in a democracy.
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