Austria has announced plans to give public prosecutors and police the remit to spy on suspects’ encrypted messenger communications.
Gerhard Karner, Austria’s Conservative interior minister, said on national TV that he saw such a measure as “sensible”.
The final responsibility, though, lay with the justice ministry, Karner added.
Currently, these surveillance powers were only be planned to be given to Austrian security in the fight against terrorism.
Karners comments followed demands from the association of public prosecutors and the Austrian federal criminal police to give them the same surveillance powers in prosecuting all types of crimes that the government was currently planning for the Austrian State security agency for preventing terrorism.
Following a school shooting in the city of Graz on June 10, in which an ex-pupil killed 10 people, Austria’s three-party government coalition agreed on Karner’s a long-held plan for a “federal trojan”. That was a computer program that would give the security agency the option to monitor the communication of suspects on social media and messenger apps.
The idea has long been the subject of heated debate with NGOs and opposition parties, who saw it as an unjustified invasion of privacy by the State with doubtful benefits in the fight to prevent terrorism.
Karner’s ideas to extend the messenger surveillance from terrorism to “ordinary” crimes, even before its introduction, has been met with rejection by his ÖVP party’s coalition partners, the Social Democrats (SPÖ) and the smaller left-wing Liberal Neos party.
Neos’ chairman Yannick Shetty said: “We will not extend the monitoring of dangerous persons to other offences during the entire government term.”
Justice minister Anna Sporrer (SPÖ), though, was more ambiguous.
On June 27, she denied there were already plans to extend the remit of the planned surveillance regime. “The federal government has agreed to implement a constitutionally compliant monitoring of dangerous individuals in order to be better protected against terrorist attacks in particular,” she told TV station Puls24.
Currently, there was no reason to change that, she added.
Sporrer did leave the door open for a later extension after a trial phase in which the State security agency could gain experience with the new tools.
“Only then does a discussion about whether and how to expand make sense at all,” she said.
Süleyman Zorba, a speaker for the opposition Greens party, said the federal trojan marked “a dam breach”.
He added: “First the interior minister tells us that surveillance should only be possible in a very narrow area of terrorist threats with very high penalties, shortly afterwards he drops the mask and calls for an expansion before the law has even been passed.
“Once the tracks for surveillance have been laid, they will be utilised to an ever-greater extent,” Zorba concluded.
