Germany’s Constitutional Court this week began hearings in Hesse and Hamburg over the use of new police surveillance software. Police laws in these states have changed to accommodate the new software, causing controversy.
Adopted from the Gotham Program developed by the US company Palantir, the “Hesse Data” is not yet in use in Hamburg, but has already been widely used by the Hesse police since 2017.
A constitutional complaint was filed by the German Civil Rights Society (GFF) in the German Supreme Court in Karlsruhe.representing 11 plaintiffs, including the prominent Frankfurt-based attorney Seda Basay Yurdiz.
The Hesse government, meanwhile, argues that the program simply reconciles data it already collects from other sources, such as surveillance cameras and online public records, and is essential to prevent serious crime. .
“Hessendata” — piecing together the puzzle
What the program can and cannot do, and what it can legally be used for, was the subject of Tuesday’s hearing, but remains unclear, largely because so little is known about the software.
Simon Egbert, a sociologist and predictive policing researcher at the University of Bielefeld, believes this is an important issue, especially considering Hessendata is searched 14,000 times a year by police. “The critical public has trouble even forming an opinion about what’s really going on,” he told DW.
A Hesse government official explained to the court how the tool has made regular police work more effective. As German legal news outlet Legal Tribune Online reported, this shows that the use of the software is “very close to traditional police work.”
But software can obviously be more invasive. German research and advocacy group AlgorithmWatch Hessendata says it combines information from police databases with phone records and social media accounts to investigate potential criminals and terrorists. Police in Hessen also want to use it for profiling child abusers and traffickers.
Concerns have been raised for some time about the software, which is now used by many European police forces. Named after the fictional city where Batman fights crime, the Gotham program was born out of Palantir’s collaboration with US intelligence agencies. According to the GFF, its capabilities will be “preventive police,” meaning that it uses internet data to predict crimes and criminal identities.
There are also concerns that the program could use AI techniques to racially profile potential criminals. Complaints about racial profiling and far-right sympathies among police have plagued the German police, especially in Hesse.
what comes first?suspicion or investigation
Hessen’s conservative Interior Minister Peter Bute said on Tuesday that Hessendata does not automatically screen social media profiles or the internet, and that it does not use ArtificiaI Intelligence technology, arguing that existing data will not be used. “A threat becomes identifiable only when all the pieces of the threat puzzle are put together,” he told the judge.
Markus Thiel, a law professor at the German Police Academy, representing the Hamburg government at Tuesday’s hearing, said the law was already very clear about what the police could and could not do. “For me, it is very important that both the Hesse and Hamburg standards formulate clear assumptions,” he told DW. , says it is used only to avoid serious threats.”
As it stands, Thiel argued, “the regulations do not allow police to use AI systems to continuously monitor citizens and create personality profiles at some point in the future.” It’s not like ‘Minority Report’ that wants to predict a threat.The law requires that the police already have information that there is a threat.”
Hessendata is essentially “a platform that gives you an overview of the data you already have,” Thiel said. “For example, in the circle of users and creators of child pornography, it was very difficult to identify who might be involved. This software can be used for that.”
The problem, according to Egbert, is that while the police must provide a reason to violate privacy, Hessendata by its very nature “does the exact opposite.” A lot of the data that the police have, although some is actually collected on social media, was collected for a completely different investigation. “In other words, if you do a search, you’ll only know later if the search was legitimate,” he said.
Civil rights activists argue that when Hessen Data has access to large amounts of data unrelated to a specific suspect, an important legal principle – investigations must be tied to a specific purpose – cannot be guaranteed. ing.
“In my opinion, there needs to be a proper discussion about whether it is allowed,” Egbert said.
Another thing that bothers Egbert is the Hesse government’s attempt to change the police law to match the software. “I find it highly doubtful that the government would just change the police law after deciding to use certain software.Of course, it would require a parliamentary majority,” he said. “And now, four years later, it’s in Karlsruhe, and the first more or less independent people decide whether it’s legal.”
Complicating an already complex issue, the Hesse parliament has asked a commission of inquiry to establish whether the government’s procurement procedures were legal. “It’s really just a stand-in issue,” Egbert said. “I think that’s a problem in itself. It seems the opposition clearly had no other way of influencing the proceedings.”
The Constitutional Court is not expected to make a decision for the next few months. In the meantime, the Hesse (and possibly Hamburg) police will continue to use the software.
Editing: Lina Goldenberg
While You’re Here: Resumes in 2023, DW’s editors round up what’s happening in German politics and society every Tuesday. You can sign up for our weekly email newsletter “Berlin Briefing” here.
