Germany Seeks Face Recognition Tech, WhatsApp Access To Track Militants

Germany is eyeing to use face recognition technology and gaining access to chat services like WhatsApp in order to track militants.

 “New security measures will be taken to combat terrorism, including the use of face recognition technology to track the movements of terrorists”. German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said Tagesspiege Saturday.

The government is planning a trial of the technology this summer at Berlin's Suedkreuz railway station. If achieved, it will be rolled out across the country.

Currentlym we have video surveillance at railway stations. However, we have not been able to store the image of a terrorist on the run in software so that it raises the alarm when he appears somewhere at a station," de Maiziere told the newspaper Tagesspiegel.

Since the proposed technology will only be used to record the faces of terrorists, the right of ordinary citizens to privacy will be unaffected.

However, other proposed measures such as official access to encrypted messenger services like WhatsApp are more controversial. "We want messenger services to have end-to-end encryption so that innocent citizens' communication is undisturbed and secure," the politician, a member of Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), said.

But with an SMS, security authorities need to have access under certain conditions, the member added.

The authorities are looking at a number of ways to monitor the communications of terrorist suspects, including the use of "online searches" of internet-connected equipment and "Quellen TKÜ" (source telecommunications surveillance).

The latter is the preventive surveillance of online Skype conversations, chat and other internet-based communication, which monitors a suspect's online communication before it is encrypted.

In February, the CDU and its coalition partners in the Social Democratic Party (SPD) published a draft amendment to the penal code which is to be debated in the Bundestag in the coming weeks. The legislation includes provisions for the use of online search and source telecommunications surveillance by police investigators.

De Maizière said that established methods of analogue surveillance should serve as the benchmark for digital surveillance.

"It must be legal and technically possible in the digital world," the Minister said.