According to 'Vremya Novostei', the bilateral agreement provides for 'automated comparison of genetic profiles and fingerprints with the databases of the other country'. In this way, within minutes it will be possible to determine whether a person suspected on German territory is also under surveillance across the ocean, and vice versa.
However, the trust in cooperation between the detectives of the two countries does not yet go too far. If, say, the results of data comparison confirm the worst assumptions, information such as the name and address of the suspect will not be automatically transmitted across the ocean. For mutual access to such data, the parties will have to resort to the well-worn bureaucratic procedure of a request for legal assistance.
The model for future transatlantic cooperation was the Prüm Treaty, signed in 2005 in the resort town of Prüm in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. Under this document, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, from December 2006, gained the ability to access each other's police databases. Criminologists soon saw the effectiveness of this approach in practice. For example, for several years German investigators could not solve a mysterious murder committed in Jena. They stumbled upon the perpetrator with the help of colleagues from Austria, where he had been caught for credit card fraud. His DNA in the Austrian police databases matched exactly the traces found in 2003 on a cigarette butt at the crime scene in Thuringia. Since then, European investigators have resolved hundreds of similar criminal cases.
The latest agreement between Germany and the US is an important but still largely symbolic step in the fight against terror. Next up is the coordination of a document on the technical implementation of the agreements reached. The fact is that US intelligence services – when they are not directly interested – are not too generous in opening their information vaults even to close foreign partners.
In the past, Berlin has repeatedly complained to Washington about the insufficient openness of US security services. But this time, as a source in the German Interior Ministry explained to 'Vremya Novostei', the bilateral agreements were the result of close cooperation between Ministers Schäuble and Chertoff, for whom the German colleague is the 'most important contact person' in Europe. Wolfgang Schäuble hopes that the transatlantic cooperation model will become a pilot project for all 26 EU countries, especially since the preamble of the agreement provides for the possibility of other EU members joining it.
But in Germany, not all politicians and high-ranking officials share the optimism of the head of the federal Interior Ministry. This is explained by the fact that Germany has a law on the protection of personal data of individuals. It regulates the nature of information that state authorities and private companies have the right to collect and transmit. Recently, the Federal Data Protection Commissioner Peter Schaar publicly criticized both the agreement signed with the Americans and the idea of possibly extending its scope to the EU.
'The Prüm Treaty, if extended to the US, will not be able to ensure the required data protection standard,' Schaar said. He explained that a similar law in the US only guarantees the protection of data of US citizens and persons residing in the US for a long time, and therefore 'clearly does not affect data coming from abroad.' As a result, there is a risk that US intelligence services will obtain information, for example, about a participant in a protest demonstration detained by police in a European country, or, say, a stowaway passenger who had a quarrel with law enforcement officers.