Passport Controversy

According to the daily taz newspaper, the German government has prepared draft legislation that would allow police to use digitalized photos saved in the country's 5,300 passport registers to help solve crimes. The taz reported on Thursday that the draft legislation, dated January 5, is marked "especially urgent" and could pass into law as early as May.

Since the end of 2005, German passports come with an inbuilt chip which contains a digital file of the passport photo. Issuing offices already save copies of this data, in the same way that paper photos were previously put on file.

But this proposal is sparking heated debate with in the Christian Democrat (CDU) and Social Democrat (SDP) coalition government

"Access to digitalized photos can't become the rule," said SPD parliamentary faction spokesperson, Dieter Wiefelspütz to the online Netzeitung.de. He said more discussions need to be held about when police could access the data online, such as "on the weekend when offices are close."

Protests from SDP

The debate is even more heated when it comes to the digitalized fingerprints, which will also be stored in the passport chip as of November this year.

According to the taz, the draft law states that "fingerprints saved by authorities have to be deleted at the latest after the dispatch of the passport."

The Christian Democratic Union (CDU) wants to delete this passage, arguing that having a copy of the fingerprint data is essential for national security. Many the Social Democrats (SDP), however, are opposed to the proposal, saying it contravenes basic civil liberties.

In an recent interview with the Handelsblatt, German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, a senior CDU member, suggested identity theft was also an attack on a person's liberties. He said internal security shouldn't be compromised just because some people were uncomfortable with modern technology.

If the fingerprints aren't saved, "you will never be able to check if another person is using your passport," Schäuble said in the interview from April 4. "Who wants to have their identity falsified?"
Schäuble came under fire last year, when a law was passed setting up a terrorism data-bank giving police and intelligence services access to detailed and highly personal information on suspected terrorists.

Germans uneasy with surveillance

Monitoring the populace has uncomfortable echoes for many in Germany, given the country's Nazi past and the surveillance by the Stasi security police in post-war communist East Germany that remains fresh in many minds.

There has also been a reminder of the dangers of using unanalyzed intelligence data in the recent case of Murat Kurnaz.

The 25-year-old German-born Turk was released in August last year after spending more than four years in the US military facility at Guantanamo Bay.

The US was reportedly prepared to release him as early as 2002, but the Germans were reluctant to allow him to return to Germany -- a fact that sparked uproar and prompted a parliamentary inquiry that is still sitting.

"Everything that could be used against Kurnaz was put forward and exaggerated to justify his continued detention," the Zeit newspaper commented.

"Evidence that was exchanged internationally was not subjected to quality-control by the judiciary ... It can be disastrous for the individual if intelligence service preventive concerns are allowed to trickle down to the police unfiltered," it added.