In its function as chairman of the EU Council, Germany has announced that it will set up an official working group there to take care of the “legally compliant monitoring” of telecommunications. It aims to develop “a common response to the massive imminent impact of 5G” on eavesdropping.

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The new mobile communications standard could set higher standards in the area of ​​data security, writes the federal government in a document that published by the British civil rights organization Statewatch. This could “seriously impair” the ability of law enforcement agencies and secret services to intercept legally. This is due, among other things, to the principle of “privacy by design”, which is more strongly taken into account with 5G. In addition, there is an increased use of “virtualization, encryption and anonymization in comparison to previous generations of cellular communication”.

According to the Federal Government, the working group should be located at Europol as a sub-section of the Criminal Prosecution Group of the Council The privacy of the user must be balanced with the interest in preserving the investigation options.

Subject encryption The Federal Government refers to its parallel initiative for a “European declaration” which as a whole “focuses on the subject of encryption and innovative solutions for targeted legal access to legitimate en law enforcement purposes “.

According to the paper, 15 member states are already on board Belgium, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Spain and Sweden as well as the Schengen countries Iceland, Norway and Switzerland. Great Britain also wants to get involved despite Brexits. A first meeting of the group should actually take place this week in Hamburg, but had to be postponed to 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Germany is pushing ahead with data retention Previously, the Anti -Terror Commissioner of the EU, Gilles de Kerchove, pointed out that investigators and the judiciary could lose “access to valuable data” in view of the “high security standards” of 5G and the detection of “false” base stations. He therefore called for security gaps to be built into IMSI catchers, for example. The local justice ministers from the federal and state governments then demanded that 5G network operators have to provide data for monitoring in the future as extensively and in the same quality as before. A potential end-to-end encryption is also problematic. This was hardly an issue during the standardization, criticized