Germany to Use Face Recognition Technology in Anti-Terror Crackdown
Local Editor
Serving its goal to track terrorists, Germany is planning to use face recognition technology and gain access to chat services like WhatsApp.
In this regard, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere announced new security measures to combat terrorism, including the use of face recognition technology to track the movements of terrorists.
The government is planning a trial of the technology this summer at Berlin's Suedkreuz railway station. If successful, it will be rolled out across the country.
"We currently have video surveillance at railway stations. However, we have not been able to, for example, 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.
"However, as with an SMS, security authorities need to have access under certain conditions."
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.
Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team
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