According to reports  published by the German parliamentary control committee, 37 Millions emails and internet connections had been subject to interception from the secret services in 2010 (5 times the 2009 figures), of which 213 cases were assessed as valuable for the purpose of fighting terrorism.

 The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BvS) who is among other tasks in charge of collecting and analysing information on violent extreme-politician movements and fight against terrorism, also authorised the deployment of IMSI-Charter, a false mobile tower used to intercept and track cellular phones, in 16 cases.

 The BvS, along with the Foreign intelligence service and the Military Counterintelligence Agency (MAD) used round 16,000 words to search communications, of which 13,000 were related to weapons trade.  

For the representatives of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the increase of communication capture by the secret services has several reasons, one of the main is the quick growth of Spam traffic that contains the search words and who represent the biggest part of the seizure.  

The 2010 increase of data surveillance by the secret services raised critics from the FDP (liberal) Ministry of Home Affairs, Gisela Piltz, who said the work of the secret services should be subject to examination because it's not only questionable as regards the rule of law, but it also put into question the efficiency of the services.

 The fact that such general words like "Bomb" were used by the services to identify communication proves to be inefficient and lead to the surveillance of possibly everyone. The leader of the German Greens in the Bundestag Renate Künast joined the liberal Minister in the critics, by adding that the search words should be more precise so that the ratio investment of means/results is significantly improved.

I blogged previously on the (re)appearing tensions between the German Liberals and the Conservatives within the government coalition on ACTA. Quiet logically, data retention is another dissension subject that will probably not be solved before the next election later this year.