Déjà-vu experience with the official statistics on telecommunications surveillance (TKÜ) from the Federal Office of Justice (BfJ): Again, the figures for the source TKÜ, in which the communication was made directly on a terminal before encryption or after decryption in the usually tapped via state trojans, clearly too high. Instead of the 98 orders for corresponding interventions in IT systems based on Section 100a of the Code of Criminal Procedure (StPO), which were recently reported for 2020, the courts actually issued “only” 25.
Last year, the BfJ saw itself forced to correct the numbers significantly downwards in the statistics for 2019: the source TKÜ initially mentioned 578 approvals, of which 368 were actually implemented. According to the updated version, however, judges issued 31 corresponding orders in 2019, three of which were actually executed.
Wrong statistics from Brandenburg
For 2020 it has now turned out that no source TKÜ was ordered or carried out in Brandenburg. “The judicial authorities there filled out the statistics incorrectly,” tweeted the WDR reporter Florian Flade on Friday. The BfJ confirmed its suspicion that the conspicuously high numbers for this federal state were not correct.
This means that 73 alleged orders are eliminated in one fell swoop. At the same time, the total number of state Trojan operations actually carried out for TKÜ sources has fallen from 15 to 11. That is still eight more than in 2019. Nine are said to have taken place in North Rhine-Westphalia in 2020, three are attributable to the Attorney General.
“Accidentally ticked the wrong box”
In the statistics for 2019, ten federal states and the Attorney General initially provided incorrect information when the BfJ queried the numbers. Judicial staff are said to have “accidentally put a tick/tick wrong” and apparently misinterpreted the arches, it was said in 2021 as an explanation. The police received the controversial powers to use state Trojans, against which various constitutional complaints are pending, in 2017. The BfJ has been showing figures on this since 2019.
So far, the statistics for 2020 on secret online searches according to paragraph 100b StPO, in which the investigators are also allowed to inspect hard drives and not only record ongoing communication, have not changed. State Trojan deployments were approved here in ten procedures. Of a total of 23 initial and extension orders, only eight are said to have been carried out. In 2019, corresponding measures were actually taken in 12 cases.
(axk)
