After presenting the shocking figures on child abuse in Germany, Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser (SPD) spoke out in favor of securing computer IP addresses in order to be able to better track child sexual abuse on the Internet.
"I think you need the IP addresses," said the SPD politician on Deutschlandfunk on Wednesday.
Recently it became known that an average of 49 children are victims of sexual violence every day.
"It's less about data retention as a whole," Faeser said now.
"It's about how we can secure the IP addresses as much as possible so that we have access in these cases and can also identify the perpetrators."
Helen Bubrowski
Political correspondent in Berlin.
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The dispute over so-called data retention has occupied German domestic and legal policy for years.
The Data Retention Act 2015 does not apply.
The European Court of Justice (ECJ) is expected to make a decision on this soon.
"We will wait and see and then implement the rule of law," said Faeser.
In the coalition agreement, it is agreed that the regulations on data retention should be designed in such a way that “data can be stored in a legally secure, event-related manner and by judicial decision”.
In its previous case law, the ECJ has generally prohibited storage without cause, but permitted exceptions.
A targeted storage of traffic and location data is possible, as well as the "freezing" of data ("quick freeze") and the storage of IP addresses to combat serious crime, provided that it is limited to what is absolutely necessary.
The FDP in particular had recently campaigned for the quick freeze procedure;
In his government survey in May, Federal Minister of Justice Marco Buschmann (FDP) expressed skepticism about the storage of IP addresses, which the state interior ministers have been promoting for a long time.