Thuringia's interior minister under attack in CCTV dispute
01 January 2004
Andreas Trautvetter (Christlich Demokratische Union, CDU), regional interior minister of the German state of Thuringia, has come under renewed attack over a CCTV project that indiscriminately stores car number plates without a legal basis. The project has now been cancelled, together with an earlier post-11 September "security programme" launched in the East German town of Weimar, which installed CCTV surveillance cameras in the city centre. This pilot project was intended to assess the effectiveness of camera surveillance over a period of one and a half years. The Weimar camera project was cancelled after its installation in October last year after protests by journalists from local newspapers, local Green and Labour party politicians and lawyers, who found themselves and their offices in view of the cameras.
Last December, the press reported that CCTV surveillance cameras were to be installed in front of a tunnel on the A71 motorway, a practice that lacks a legal basis according to Thuringia's data protection officer, Silvia Liebaug. A day after the reports, Trautvetter defended the project in parliament, arguing that a car number plate recognition system was not planned and was not supported by him. However, it was soon revealed that the cameras had already been installed, which, opposition and journalists argue, could not have gone unnoticed by the Interior Minister, if only because it took 150,000 Euro out of his budget. By September 2003, press reports said 659 database entries had been stored by police in Suhl. The socialist Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus (PDS) ordered a special parliamentary meeting and demanded the minister's resignation for lying to parliament, which was rejected by a parliamentary vote.
Criticisms of Trautvetter's "data collection mania" (taz) was voiced in October last year by lawyers and journalists against the 125,000 Euro project in Weimar. There, Trautvetter had ordered the installation of video cameras on the Goetheplatz, which overlooked the offices of the Thuringian regional Landeszeitung and the Thüringer Allgemeinen, one lawyer's office and council offices of the Green and Social Democratic parties. This violated the right to privacy of clients and informants and the freedom of the press, at the same time. Trautvetter defended the decision in a regional TV broadcast: "The more data I collect, the better I can target crime fighting". The controversy led to parliamentary leader Dieter Althaus stopping the project, with the promise that a future project would exclude offices from the camera's view. Cameras would only focus on places "where criminal energy is concentrated", which in Weimar, according to the German daily paper taz, are the press offices, the House of Democracy and the National Theatre. Research carried out in Holland has found that local council CCTV projects are often recommended by the same private companies which later install them on their own expert advice.
MDR.de 22.12.03, taz 24.10.03 & 27.12.03, Süddeutsche Zeitung 18.12.03