aa) The provision gives the Federal Criminal Police Office the permission to use data it collected itself for the purpose of protecting against international terrorism in the
performance of its duties pursuant to § 4a sec. 1 sentence 1 BKAG. With that, the
provision first – as an inherent consequence of authorising the collection of data – enables the use of the data in accordance with the specific purpose for which it was collected. Furthermore, however, it also enables a use of the data that goes beyond the
respective investigation procedure. Due to the reference to § 4a sec. 1 sentence 1
BKAG, this further use of the data is limited to the protection against international terrorism. When applying a factually appropriate understanding of this reference, it also
determines that the data may only be used to prevent those qualified criminal offences mentioned in § 4a sec. 1 sentence 2 BKAG and thus only for the protection of
those high-ranking legal interests regarding which the data collection powers of subsection 3a – including the particularly intrusive surveillance powers in §§ 20g et seq.
BKAG – may be deployed for protection purposes.
296
(1) The reference to § 4a sec. 1 sentence 1 BKAG, however, raises doubts as to its
meaning. These can be overcome by way of interpretation so that the provision does
not fail to meet specificity standards. It is not clear how § 4a sec. 1 sentence 1 and 2
BKAG are to be delimited: in assigning the task of providing protection against dangers, sentence 1 is aligned with the wording of Art. 73 sec. 1 no. 9a GG which also
covers the prevention of criminal offences (see above, C I 1); sentence 2, however,
explicitly distinguishes between the prevention of criminal offences and the protection
against dangers. However, due to its nature as a provision setting out duties for the
protection against dangers, § 4a sec. 1 sentence 1 BKAG also includes investigations in advance of specific dangers, and the reference in § 20v sec. 4 sentence 2
no. 1 BKAG is thus, essentially, sufficiently open to interpretation after all; the provision aims to allow the use of data in general, and, if necessary, also as a mere evidentiary basis for further investigations, for the purpose of providing protection
against threats from international terrorism.
297
In addition, the provision is not too unspecific insofar as § 4a sec. 1 BKAG only generally refers to “threats from international terrorism”. Even though § 20v sec. 4 sentence 2 no. 1 BKAG only refers to sentence 1 of the provision, the further specification of the dangers listed therein requires resorting to the detailed definition in
sentence 2, which conclusively enumerates and further specifies certain criminal offences. The fact that the criminal offences enumerated there with regard to the prevention of criminal offences are also decisive for the protection against threats under
sentence 1 also conforms to the systematics of the Act as such (cf. e.g. § 20a sec. 2
BKAG).
298
(2) Given that § 20v sec. 4 sentence 2 no. 1 BKAG allows the use of data only to
protect against threats from terrorist offences within the meaning of § 4a sec. 1 sentence 2 BKAG, this also ensures that this use is only permitted for the protection of
those legal interests in regard to which the data collection powers may also be exercised. The same applies to data obtained by particularly intrusive surveillance mea-
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