The Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) has been forced to reduce its mass surveillance of passengers without cause, due to European and national judgments. Last year, the police authority was able to conduct a full controversial sky grid search, with more than 121 million air passengers affected. The numbers come from a response from the federal government, available online from heise, to a request from the left-wing parliamentary group in the Bundestag. In 2022, aviation companies transmitted 424,305,929 so-called Passenger Name Records (PNR) to the passenger data center located at the BKA.
However, the BKA is now required to significantly reduce its PNR retention due to the landmark judgement of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) of June 2022. The ECJ raised the hurdles for the previously practiced PNR retention and, at the end of last year, the administrative court in Wiesbaden classified the BKA dragnet search as illegal. To adapt the PNR evaluation to the ECJ requirements, the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI) has developed a package of measures together with the authorities concerned. The authorities are also working to implement the ECJ’s announcement that PNR may only be stored for six months.
The draft by the EU Commission to collect more API data (Advance Passenger Information) at the same time and to transmit it to the responsible authorities via a central router must be evaluated more closely. The cost for ongoing operations alone in 2022 was 3.2 and 11.4 million euros respectively – not including the use of internal staff. Left-wing domestic politician Martina Renner criticized the PNR system for “swallowing the data of millions of innocent citizens” and considers PNR storage to be “highly disproportionate” and too labour-intensive in view of the hundreds of positions at the BVA and BKA.
