BERLIN, April 4 (UPI) -- Germany's top security chief wants to tighten the country's security and anti-terror laws further, a plan met with considerable resistance from half of the government.
Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, a senior member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union, has in the past raised eyebrows for proposing far-reaching measures to fight crime and counter terrorism; his latest advances reported by German news magazine Der Spiegel and confirmed by the Interior Ministry have sparked protests from the grand coalition partner, the Social Democratic Party.
"I find some of the ideas too far-reaching," Sebastian Edathy, chairman of the Committee on Internal Affairs of the Bundestag, the lower chamber of Germany's Parliament, told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper. "We are not a surveillance state and we don't want to become one."
Schaeuble plans to expand surveillance within the context of the fight against terrorism. He wants to increase the preventive means of the Federal Criminal Police Office, or BKA, by making major bugging and data-trawling operations easier to conduct. BKA agents should be allowed to conduct preventive criminal data searches and secret online searches of private computers; moreover, the interior minister wants to store the data of Germany's toll system to help prevent and solve criminal and terrorist acts. Edathy rejected in particular Schaeuble's plan to have fingerprints, which in the future will be saved in a chip in citizens' passports, stored with federal registration offices.
"Storing the fingerprints of all members of the population is incompatible with the notion of a democratic state governed by the rule of law," Edathy told the newspaper, adding that such searches should only be possible with judicial oversight in major criminal cases or when there are grounds for suspecting that a terrorist attack is being planned.
"The proposals made by Wolfgang Schaeuble have neither been discussed and agreed with us, the Social Democrats, beforehand nor do they form the basis for the policies pursued by the grand coalition," Klaus Uwe Benneter, a member of the Social Democratic Party and an expert on legal policy, told Tuesday's Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper. He called Schaeuble's advances a cheap attempt at amassing political capital.
Benneter told German news channel n-tv Wednesday that Schaeuble was trying to push through his measures by "fueling the terror scare," adding that "we will not let ourselves be terrified."
The opposition has struck an even harsher note.
Hans-Christian Stroebele, a senior Green Party lawmaker, told German online daily Netzeitung that Schaeuble, with his new initiative, proved to be even "worse than his predecessor" -- the notoriously conservative former Interior Minister Otto Schily.
"Schaeuble unnecessarily sacrifices key civil rights," Stroebele said, adding that the threat of terror attacks would not be minimized by the new measures. "Criminal data searches in Germany will not impress al-Qaida in the Afghan mountains," he said.
More criticism came from data-protection groups and even from the police union, which called Schaeuble's plans to store the fingerprint data of Germans as a first step "to laying the foundation for the creation of comprehensive digital files on each and every citizen." Such an approach would not serve to build confidence in the work of the police, the union said.
Schaeuble, who barely survived an assassination attack in the 1990s and since is confined to a wheelchair, has on repeated occasions advocated tougher security and anti-terror laws. Most of his advances, however, have been squashed by court decisions or opposition from the Social Democratic Party.
In the wake of terror-attack plans in London and Germany last year, Schaeuble called for a change to the country's more than 50-year-old constitution to enable the German Army to be deployed domestically in case of a terror attack. The plan failed because of too much opposition from the remaining parties, as it has done on several occasions in the past.
Yet Schaeuble also managed to realize some of his plans.
After a foiled train bombing in western Germany, Schaeuble managed to push through the anti-terror file, a database that includes wide-ranging details on a terror suspect, such as the person's religious affiliation, profession, travel data, bank and telecommunications history, and possible contact persons. The idea for a central anti-terror database was first raised by Schaeuble in 2002 but failed at the time because of privacy concerns. However, with Merkel's backing and due to widespread public concern over the foiled train bombings, it was approved last December and officially went live last Friday.
