In December, the Federal Office of Justice (BfJ) published statistics for the first time on how often federal and state investigators made use of their 2017 authorization to make internet calls and monitor messenger communications when a variety of criminal offenses are suspected and conduct clandestine online searches. Accordingly, investigators use state trojans 2019 380 – times. However, the number of measures that are associated with great effort and deep encroachments on fundamental rights is apparently too high.

Wrongly interpreted The justice ministries and public prosecutors of the federal states initially insisted on their information, according to a report by WDR and NDR. In the end, however, some of them admitted that they had inadvertently provided false information. One has to “backtrack” clearly in terms of source telecommunications surveillance, said a spokesman for the Bremen public prosecutor’s office, according to the report.

The reported cases had been reviewed. It turned out that a department head “apparently misinterpreted the sheets. As a result, we have no implementation.” Public prosecutors in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and North Rhine-Westphalia also announced that they had actually not initiated such surveillance. The Hessian and Saxon justice departments expressed considerable doubts about the figures and wanted to initiate a revision. From the Saarland it was said that it was a “faulty statistical record”. The responsible persons there had initially reported 12 orders, of which 24 what made no sense.

Sebastian Fiedler from the Bund deutscher Kriminalbeamter criticized the sloppiness: “The judicial administrations should have noticed at first glance that the numbers couldn’t be right.” This complicated form of monitoring is seldom successful in practice. For the German police, the source TKÜ is “not an everyday tool”.

(kbe)