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Britta Eder’s phone book is full of people whom the German state considers criminals. As an active defense attorney ad HamburgHis client list includes anti-fascists, campaigners against nuclear energy and members of the PKK, a militant Kurdish nationalist organization that the government of Turkey and the European Union (EU) classify as a terrorist group.
For the sake of her clients, Eder is used to being cautious on the phone: “When I talk on the phone I always think maybe I’m not alone”he says. This awareness also extends to phone calls with his mother.
But when in 2019 Hamburg approved a new one law that allowed the police to use data analysis software developed by the company Palantir, backed by the CIA, Eder feared becoming further entangled in the big data web. A feature of Palantir’s Gotham platform allows police to map phone contact networks, placing people like Eder – who have connections to people suspected of crimes but are not criminals – under surveillance.
“I thought: this is the next stage in the police’s attempts to get a better chance of observe people without any concrete evidence linking them to a crime“, says Eder, who with ten other plaintiffs decided to try to have the law overturned. On February 16, their efforts were successful.
The German Federal Constitutional Court – the Bundesverfassungsgericht – he has declared unconstitutional the Hamburg law and has published for the first time of strict guidelines how the police use automated data analysis tools like Palantir’s, and be wary of including information about people like witnesses or lawyers. The sentence he claims that the Hamburg law and a similar one adopted by the land Hessian”they allow the police to create comprehensive profiles of individuals, groups and circles with a single click“, without distinguishing between criminal suspects and people connected to them.
The sentence
The decision does not prohibit the use of Gotham, but it limits how the police can use the service: “For Your risk of being flagged or having your data processed by Palantir will now be drastically reduced“, says Bijan Moini, legal director of the Society for Civil Rights (GFF) in Berlin, who took the case to court.
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