1. The German police needs a common IT platform.
The program "Police 2020" is intended to unify the fragmented IT infrastructure of the German police authorities, but is still a huge construction site. So far, state police agencies have been working with different private service providers, developing their own IT solutions and projects, and sometimes storing their data in local databases. This makes collaboration difficult and expensive. According to Andreas Lezgus, the head of the "Police 2020" program, there are currently "thousands of applications" side by side.
"Wherever it makes sense, we want to work with unified tools and systems and provide the best solutions on a single platform for all countries, including for economic reasons," said Lezgus. In this way, police application developers could save time in the future, as server, platform or software components would already be available.
Given the bureaucratic processes in the security agencies, Lezgus says it took six to seven years in the past before new software could be deployed. In addition, open source products should reduce dependence on manufacturers. However, previous IT modernization attempts by the police authorities were a disaster. The year 2020 will therefore be only one step towards the goal for the "Police 2020" program. "This process will take several years," Lezgus curtailed.
2. The fight against cybercrime should be better coordinated.
In the coming year, the Federal Office of Criminal Investigation intends to set up a cybercrime department to assist the federal states in investigations and to facilitate transnational coordination. "We are planning to set up our own department, but the starting signal has not yet been given," said Holger Münch, head of the Federal Criminal Police Office, at the police congress. A "Quick Reaction Force", which is quickly ready for action in the case of current hacker attacks, is to be expanded into a fixed department and bundle competences.
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Binary code on a computer screen
For attacks involving several states, the investigators could respond faster. The new body will also develop tools for country and federal agencies, as well as Europol partners, and facilitate the coordination of international investigations - for example against botnet operators. How many positions the department should have is so far unclear.
In January, the Ministry of the Interior had also announced the "Cyber Defense Center Plus" in response to the publication of politicians' data for better coordination of protection and defense measures - and the expansion of the office located at the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) was long gone planned.
3. Authorities need to create more attractive conditions for IT talent.
The recruitment of IT experts remains a problem for the security authorities. Conditions in the private sector are usually more attractive to hackers - and not everyone wants to crack encryption technologies for security agencies. The image problem of the authorities certainly also contributes to hardliner positions, as they were also noticed at the police congress. For example, Günter Krings, Parliamentary State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of the Interior, called for a ban on the Darknet. Wolfgang Sobotka, President of the Austrian National Council, praised China for the more flexible handling of data protection and anonymity.
Also the central office for information technology in the security area (ZITiS) - which is to develop tools among other things to read smartphones - crypto experts are still missing: She is currently looking in several job offers for "people like the ingenious inventor Q, whose extraordinary inventions James Bond successful do". With a permanent contract and flexible working hours, the research facility tries to recruit hackers. By 2020, 400 jobs will be built there.
4. Automation and artificial intelligence could make it easier for investigators to work - but you need frameworks.
The hype surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) in policing is high and many security agencies are already testing automation and forecasting tools for investigation, prevention and threat prevention. With intelligent image and video analysis investigators scour photos from mobile videos and surveillance cameras. Interpol has been tracking child pornography images on the Internet for a long time now. The Federal Criminal Police Office uses the forecasting software "Radar-iTE" to calculate the dangerousness of terrorist suspects. State Criminal Investigations calculate the likelihood of burglaries and try to expose patterns.
But above all the pilot projects for facial recognition or for the "calculation" of the danger of humans are controversial. In Hamburg, for example, a court has to decide if a reference database of biometric face IDs is allowed, with investigators looking for criminals from the G20 summit. It also has to be debated how much power and data access private service providers receive from the police - for example in the case of the US analysis company Palantir, whose software is used by the Hessian police. AI ethics and binding framework conditions for the use of automation and AI should also become standard in the police sector. It must become more transparent which data and criteria a system uses to generate a hazard message - and the use of software must be scientifically monitored.
5. Tame the data chaos
Not only as a basis for future applications such as AI, it is important that the police authorities get their data chaos under control. Data is collected by different police agencies according to different criteria - and transparency is low. Information is spread across many databases, and different systems complicate both cross-agency and international cooperation. "We are currently creating data in dissociated systems and operating an enormous number of interfaces to hunt this data across the nation," said Gerald Eder, coordinator of federal-state cooperation for the "Police Program 2020".
In cross-border crimes - if, for example, a suspected terrorist fled to another state or criminal groups are active in several regions - each investigator must "quickly recognize and evaluate relationships and that regardless of whether an act in Bavaria or Schleswig-Holstein has taken place" , demanded Lezgus. In the course of the modernization program, a central data center located at the Federal Criminal Police Office is to be created, which also contains personal data from other police authorities - insofar as these refer to cases of transnational significance.
With a digital identity management and a color coding of the data to ensure that only authorized users have access. "In a serious crime or security, an investigator may query everything, but not in medium and light crime," said Stefan Jordan, Head of Unit 1 of the Police 2020 program at the Federal Criminal Police Office. Policemen should not "reach into all databases, such as when a wrong parked car is on the side of the road".