Germany: Internet service providers to intercept customers
01 November 2004
From 1 January 2005, German telecommunications providers will have to have the necessary technical and organisational equipment installed for the interception of their communications. The relevant regulation on interception of telecommunications (
Telekommunikationsüberwachungsverordnung - TKÜV) was passed in October 2001 (see Statewatch Vol. 11 no. 5), but providers were given three years to put the regulation into practice. The ISPs have to install and pay for the necessary interception equipment themselves and some of them have issued a one-off extra payment from their customers, in effect to pay for their own possible interception. The cost of the purchase and installation of the necessary interception box ranges from 10,000 to 50,000 Euro. The ISPs are also responsible for repair and servicing.
An interception box, which is connected to the servers (computers) on which customers' e-mails or personal data are stored, functions as an interface that allows law enforcement agencies to intercept at the push of a button, without the service providers noticing. Internal and external secret service agencies as well as the military defence authority (
Militärischer Abschirmdienst, MAD) do not require an order from a judge for the interception. They merely need to have a “concrete indication” of a crime or the planning thereof, to carry out the interception. Some service providers are excluded from the general obligation to pay for and install the boxes (but still have to cooperate on request), for example, those that have less than 1,000 customers, those that only provide for friends and employees, or service providers that only connect their customers to the internet without providing mail or other telecommunications services. If the providers have not installed the interception boxes by 1 January 2005, they could be fined 500,000 Euro.
Implementation of this regulation will provide the German state with the technical infrastructure for the effective, fast and wide-scale interception of telecommunications. Due to the limited control possibilities, it is likely to lead to an increase in interception. The only protection from interception that remains, some argue, are encryption programmes such as PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) or GnuPG (Gnu Privacy Guard). With this compulsory implementation imposed on service providers, Germany follows the EU Council Resolution on Law Enforcement Operational Needs with Respect to Public Telecommunication Networks and Services (20 June 2001, document number 9194/01).
Jungle World 8.12.04<