Translated material
Transatlantic free riders
US and German intelligence agencies will identify terrorists
Germany and the United States will more actively exchange data on suspects of involvement in international terrorism. German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble and Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries agreed on this yesterday in Berlin with their American colleagues - Homeland Security Minister Michael Chertoff and Justice Minister Michael Mukasey. The bilateral agreement provides for “automated comparison of gene profiles and fingerprints with data banks of another country.” This way, in a matter of minutes it will be possible to determine whether a person suspected of being on German territory is also under surveillance overseas and vice versa.However, trust in cooperation between detectives from the two countries has not yet gone too far. If, say, the results of a data comparison confirm the worst assumptions, information such as the name and address of a suspect will not automatically be transmitted across the ocean. For mutual access to such information, the parties will have to resort to the bureaucratic procedure of requesting legal assistance, which has been established over the years.
The model for future transatlantic cooperation was the Treaty of Prüm, signed in 2005 in the resort town of Prüm in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. According to this document, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Spain, France, the Netherlands and Luxembourg have been able to mutually access police data banks since December 2006. Criminologists were quickly convinced of the effectiveness of this approach. Thus, for several years, German investigators could not solve one mysterious murder committed in Jena. They came across the criminal with the help of colleagues from Austria, where he was caught committing credit card fraud. His DNA in Austrian police data banks matched traces found in 2003 on a cigarette butt found at a murder scene in Thuringia. Since then, European investigators have dealt with hundreds of similar crime stories.
Yesterday's agreement between Germany and the United States is an important, but still largely symbolic, step in the fight against terror. Next in line is the approval of a document on the technical implementation of the agreements reached. The fact is that the US intelligence services - when they are not directly interested in this - are not very generous in opening up their information storehouses even to close foreign partners.
In the past, Berlin has repeatedly complained to Washington about the lack of openness of American security services. But this time, as a source in the German Ministry of Internal Affairs explained to Vremya Novostey, bilateral agreements were the result of close cooperation between ministers Schäuble and Chertoff, for whom the German colleague is the “most important contact person” in Europe. Mr. Schäuble expects that the transatlantic model of cooperation will become a pilot project for all 26 EU countries, especially since the preamble of the agreement provides for the possibility of other EU members joining it.
But in Germany, not all politicians and high-ranking officials share the optimism of the head of the federal Ministry of Internal Affairs. This is explained by the fact that Germany has a law on the protection of personal data of individuals. It regulates the nature of information that government agencies and private companies have the right to accumulate and transmit. Yesterday, the government's federal data protection commissioner, Peter Schaar, publicly criticized both the agreement signed with the Americans and the idea of a possible extension of its scope to the EU.
“The Treaty of Prüm, if extended to the United States, would not provide the required standard of data protection,” Mr. Schaar said. He explained that a similar law in the United States only guarantees the protection of data of citizens of this country and persons living in the United States for a long time, and therefore “definitely does not affect data coming from abroad.” As a result, there is a danger that US intelligence services will have information, for example, about a protest participant detained by police in one of the European countries, or, say, a stowaway passenger who quarreled with law enforcement officers.