Strobl: Traffic light safety policy "total failure"

Created: 02/20/2022, 09:25 am

Thomas Strobl (CDU) during an interview.

© Bernd Weißbrod/dpa/archive image

Big traffic light is watching you?

On the contrary, the federal government is reluctant to monitor it.

From the point of view of the CDU Interior Minister Strobl, this endangers the security of the citizens.

Stuttgart - The Baden-Württemberg Minister of the Interior, Thomas Strobl, gave the federal traffic light government a devastating testimony with regard to security policy.

"One does not want to protect the citizens from crime, but above all one wants to protect data," said the CDU politician in Stuttgart of the German Press Agency.

The security policy is so hidden in the coalition agreement between the SPD, Greens and FDP that he had to scroll for a long time before he found the topic.

"However, I put the statements on the kitchen scales at home, which are very modern - and there was no rash.

That's very thin."

"The traffic light and its coalition agreement is a total failure for the security authorities in the digital age: traffic light disruption," said the CDU interior minister.

Strobl's main argument: communication no longer takes place over the phone, but via encrypted messenger services.

That is why the authorities also needed new means of monitoring, which the traffic light denied them.

"If we don't give the security authorities a modern, digital instrument box, they will be flying blind at this point.

In my view, this is grossly negligent and absolutely irresponsible.”

The federal government’s coalition agreement states: “We are raising the intervention thresholds for the use of surveillance software, including commercial software.” SPD, Greens and FDP speak out against using IT security gaps for surveillance or against so-called hackbacks as a means of cyber defence or against an identification obligation in the network.

For Strobl, the traffic light endangers internal security.

He believes that the fight against crime must be able to keep pace in the digital age.

According to Strobl, the fact that messenger services are increasingly transmitting content in encrypted form increases the security of users, but carries the risk that "things are happening in secret".

However, the state must not be blind and deaf and must be able to specifically monitor communication in individual cases - and use IT weak points, for example, to get content.

A nationwide uniform line is urgently needed, he demanded, because: "Criminals don't stop at national borders, and certainly not in cyberspace."

With the help of the so-called source telecommunications surveillance (Quellen-TKÜ), the police can monitor communication via messenger services "under narrow conditions" at the source - i.e. before encryption, said Strobl.

It is an important building block in the fight against terrorist threats, for example.

The Baden-Württemberg police use these legal options to prevent the most serious crimes.

The source TKÜ is about listening to and intercepting telephone calls and SMS that are encrypted via Internet-based services such as Whatsapp.

The Greens in the southwest supported the source TKÜ in the police law, but not the online search of devices.

Strobl also advocates the possibility of hackbacks if critical infrastructures are attacked.

"Here we urgently need legal and technical options to actively defend our IT systems." In addition, criminals must be clearly identifiable on the Internet.

"Hate and hate speech must not be allowed to break through the network's anonymity." Strobl has long been demanding that the Telegram network be obliged to release criminal offenders' data immediately and to delete criminal content.

The authorities would also have to be able to use software vulnerabilities to “infiltrate systems” and thus covertly monitor them.

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Strobl's wishes met with little understanding from the country's green coalition partner.

"You don't do domestic politics with the kitchen scales and you don't do digital politics without data protection," said the Greens' domestic policy spokesman, Oliver Hildenbrand.

He defended the traffic light - the new federal government was leaving the "dangerous wrong path of reacting to threats to internal security with ever more extensive restrictions on freedom and civil rights".

The fact that Telegram recently deleted several dozen channels with right-wing extremist and anti-Semitic content shows that the federal government's policy is also having an effect in the area of ​​messenger services.

dpa