2024-02-29 09:47:19
A mammoth task awaits the BKA: it is supposed to examine many times the number of previous cases of possible crimes on the Internet. However, the most important thing is missing: There are no reports.
The Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) plans to employ 450 employees in the future to process reports from online platforms about possible crimes on their sites. An impressive number that shows how seriously German investigative authorities are taking the problem. The only thing is that so far these reports have only come in a drop at a time.
Although the BKA assumes that 720,000 cases per year need to be processed, only suspected cases in the low double-digit range have been registered since last August. The BKA confirmed this to t-online. The reason: A number of networks have not reported anything to the BKA.
Experts criticize the unclear legal situation
A new law should accelerate exactly that: The European Digital Services Act (DSA) has required YouTube, X, Facebook & Co. to work on a large scale for the security authorities since August 2023. The regulation has also applied to smaller providers since February 17th. It is an attempt to take more effective action against illegal content on the Internet; the DSA is intended to make the Internet safer. If someone posts on
However, it also increases the “danger of a new quality of surveillance through online platforms,” criticizes the Society for Freedom Rights (GFF) in a statement to the Bundestag.
From the point of view of many experts, the regulation in Article 18 is not clear: What is meant in Germany when the European directive speaks of suspected crimes “that pose a danger to the life or safety of people”? This is the requirement according to which providers should transmit certain user data to law enforcement authorities. “Due to a lack of clarity for service providers as to the scenarios in which data should be transferred, there is a risk of mass data transfer,” says the GFF.
One hour effort per report
The number of 720,000 such reports can be found in the draft law for the Digital Services Act, which is the name of the national implementation of the DSA. The BKA has made appropriate estimates for the draft, which was only approved so late in the cabinet that the Bundestag could not yet pass the law, and continues to assume this scope.
In the event of incidents, the authority should pre-sort what could actually be criminally relevant. The first results of the investigation into suspected perpetrators (often research into the user profile and other profiles) are then passed on to the public prosecutor’s office. On average, one hour of work is calculated per report, so 720,000 hours were planned.
This cannot be done with the existing staff: the personnel requirements at the BKA will therefore increase by a total of 404 positions to 450 as a result of the new tasks, according to the Digital Services Act. It is mainly about employees in the operational area who investigate the identity of users. The costs for this detective work are expected to rise from 3 million euros per year to 44 million.
However, the corresponding financial resources for additional staff were not taken into account in the 2024 budget. This is how the strange constellation arises: There are currently neither the new BKA investigators nor the reports that they should have checked because the platforms are not reporting.
Investigators are often at a disadvantage against the networks
Not an entirely new experience. Two years ago, on February 1, 2022, a central reporting point for criminal content on the Internet (ZMI BKA) began its work at the BKA. At the time, the German Network Enforcement Act provided for mandatory reporting, but Google and Meta successfully litigated before the Cologne Administrative Court. The court saw the regulation as a violation of European law. The networks didn’t have to worry about the BKA – and the ZMI couldn’t work as it wanted.
Since then, the ZMI has at least worked with reports from the positions “HessenGegenHetze”, “REspect!” from Baden-Württemberg, state media authorities and two public prosecutors general. The EU now has an obligation to report networks, but nothing has changed at first.
Networks refer to existing reporting channels
People have always been reporting, as they say from YouTube and Google to t-online. But not directly to the BKA as requested and not via the reporting portal created by the BKA for this purpose. As in previous years, criminal content and activities are reported “via established reporting channels” via other bodies, which forward them to German investigative authorities such as the BKA. Other networks make similar statements.