No more faxes in the Bundestag. Fax machines are to be completely abolished from the coming legislative period. This was decided by the Bundestag’s Council of Elders on Thursday. So far, fax machines are still eagerly used in certain areas in the German parliament, as emerged from a response from the federal government to a request from the FDP in the year 2020. Around 900 fax machines are said to still be in the possession of Parliament.

About 200 Fax machines should be in operation at the Foreign Office, in the Ministry of Labor it is 135 in the Ministry of Finance 130, writes the Saarbrücker Zeitung . The Ministry of the Interior justifies the use of fax machines by sending secret classified information by fax.

Mockery and Haem The use of fax machines has caused a lack of understanding among the younger generation in the Bundestag for years. So after the decision of the Council of Elders, ridicule and malice were not long in coming from these parliamentarians: The 43 – year-old parliamentary manager of the Left, Jan Korte wrote on Twitter that the council of elders had ushered in “a new era” and scoffed: “It’ll be a blatant change.”

Also Marco Buschmann, 43 years old and Parliamentary Managing Director of the FDP, announced the decision of the Council of Elders as “good news”. The Bundestag has now arrived “in the 21. Century”.

Negative example of health authorities The coronavirus pandemic also showed that fax machines are still often used in authorities to transmit information. In Germany, health authorities whose systems were not connected to the German Electronic Reporting and Information System for Infection Protection (DEMIS) worked with fax machines, for example to obtain laboratory results. A fax is considered legally secure and has a high level of data security, since the transmission is encrypted throughout. The use of emails to transmit test results from the laboratories is not permitted for data protection reasons, it said.

The data transmitted on paper must then be transferred to the health department’s digital system, which is time-consuming and error-prone will. Since the beginning 2021 the use of DEMIS has been mandatory for the health authorities.

(olb)