and weapons as well as international terrorism and drug trade. The Federal Minister
of the Interior claimed that, through the orders restricting telecommunications privacy,
the wide geographic range of the areas mentioned in the rules has been limited to
only a few states.
The Federal Minister of the Interior explained that a list of search concepts is part of
each restriction order. Formal search concepts (subscriber lines of foreigners or foreign companies in foreign countries, to the extent permitted pursuant to §§ 3.2[2] and
3.2[3] of the G 10 Act) as well as content-related search concepts (e.g. terms from
arms technology or names of chemicals needed for the manufacturing of illegal
drugs) have been used. For the identification of threats in the field of weapons proliferation, approximately 2,000 search concepts have been employed, in the field of
conventional arms trade almost 1,000, in the field of terrorism about 500 and in the
field of drug trade about 400. Due to the poor results in the fields of terrorism and the
drug trade, these restriction orders were not renewed in 1998.
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As part of his defence of the monitoring provisions the Federal Minister of the Interior explained that the screening of telecommunications contacts has been restricted
from the legal as well as the technical and capacity perspectives. For legal reasons,
telecommunications traffic within Germany and within foreign states as well as linebound international traffic are exempt from monitoring. Technically, screening is primarily restricted by the fact that the Federal Intelligence Service can, in the case of
telecommunications traffic via satellite, only survey the downlink to Germany, not the
uplink from Germany to foreign countries. Telecommunications contacts via microwave can only be screened if the microwave line is situated near one of the few
points from which screening takes place. A targeted observation of specific acts of
communication cannot be performed because the transmission routes cannot be determined beforehand.
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In his reply to the constitutional complaints the Federal Minister of the Interior explained that the capacity of the Federal Intelligence Service permits the screening of
approximately 15,000 acts of telecommunication per day out of a total of approximately 8 million telecommunications contacts between Germany and foreign countries. The material and personal resources of the Federal Intelligence Service, however, are not sufficient to evaluate all contacts. According to the Federal Minister of
the Interior, experience has shown that out of the total number of screened acts of
telecommunication, approximately 700 fall under the area of application of the G 10
Act. Only these acts are selected with the help of the search concepts. About 70 of
them are examined more closely by employees of the Federal Intelligence Service.
Not more than 15 alerts per day are passed on to specialised staff for examination. Of
all international telecommunications contacts with subscriber lines in Germany, less
than 0.1 thousandth enter the automatic selection process and less than 0.01 thousandth receive the attention of the evaluation staff of the Federal Intelligence Service.
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The Federal Minister of the Interior further argued that fully automatic evaluation on
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