German Tap Lessons

When it comes to keeping tabs on its own residents in the ongoing war on terror, theres a lot the United States could learn from Germany. Interestingly, the lessons would not be from Nazi Germany, where average citizens were encouraged to report on their neighbors, or from East Germany, where hundreds of thousands of people provided damning evidence about their friends and families. Neither regime lived up to its popular reputation as an all-knowing spy state.

Its modern Deutschlandwhere West German police created a vast system of wiretaps and surveillance databases in the 1970sthat can offer the United States crucial insights into domestic espionage. And unfortunately for believers in this approach, the lessons from Germany arent encouraging: Its extensive internal surveillance has seen little success in detecting terrorist plots or putting conspirators behind bars.

Germanys aggressive history of domestic intelligence began in the 1970s in response to a terror threat from the Red Army Faction (RAF), a left-wing guerilla group devoted to overthrowing the government. As RAF attacks increased in the late 1970s, Horst Herold, head of the German federal police and a firm believer in data mining and electronic tools, poured his agencys resources into gathering information on the groups members. In the 1980s, when changes in immigration laws and lenient student visa policies expanded Germanys sizeable immigrant community, the snooping increased considerably. As it became clear that members of radical Muslim groups were using these policies to take refuge in the country, German authorities realized they would need to keep tabs on people who stirred suspicion.

September 11 and revelations of a Hamburg cells involvement gave authorities added incentive to increase the surveillance. During the past decade, Germany has increased its use of wiretaps by 500 percent. In 2004 alone, more than 29,000 wiretaps were approved, seven times the number authorized by U.S. courts that same year. The bulk of these taps are focused on common criminalsmoney launderers, extortionists, and the like. But a small percentage is aimed at people who fit the profile of potential terrorists.

Yet German authorities cannot point to a single successful prosecution of a terror suspect identified from these blind wiretaps. The colossal volume of information produced from tens of thousands of these taps often obscures real threats, while dead ends are pursued. Authorities quite simply do not have the time to listen to and process it all. In the one case in which such surveillance was used to detect a terror plot (and has yet to lead to a conviction in court), the authoritiesthanks to old-fashioned investigative methodsalready knew the identities of the alleged plotters. Its hardly a ringing endorsement for the kind of all-encompassing, warrantless surveillance that the United States government wants its citizens to accept.

In reality, Germanys best successes against terror groups have had little to do with wiretapping. Ihsan Garnaoui, a Tunisian immigrant accused in 2003 of attempting to set up a terror training camp in a Berlin mosque, was turned in by informants. Abdelghani Mzoudi, charged (though eventually acquitted) of lending aid to the September 11 terrorists, gave himself up to authorities. When Lokman Mohammed was arrested in 2003 and sentenced to seven years in prison in January for helping terrorists travel into and out of Iraq, police relied on basic data such as immigration violations and cell phone theftsnot records of his phone conversationsto track and arrest him. And when authorities rounded up a ring of terrorists in Dsseldorf in April 2002, they broke the case because a member of the ring decided to turn in his fellow suspects. In all these cases, German authorities found that wiretapping doesnt necessarily work better than less-technological and more time-consuming, old-fashioned detective work.

Thats not to say that wiretapping doesnt have some uses. In December 2004, the German police successfully used a wiretap to break up an alleged plot by three men to assassinate Ayad Allawi, then prime minister of Iraq, during a visit to Germany. But this success was not due to random listening alone. Authorities stumbled upon the plot while investigating Mohammed and tapping his known associates, the kind of surveillance that, in the United States, a judge could approve with a warrant.

So, why havent wiretaps yielded much information about terror operations? Part of the reason is that terrorists have become savvier. Theyve learned not to discuss sensitive matters by telephone. They use couriers and shared e-mail accounts to send messages instead. But, more important, there is simply far too much information for authorities to wade through. Key points are hidden by the reams of data that modern society generates. Increasing the number of wiretaps often just increases the size of the haystack, making the needle that much harder to find.

If a nation with a quarter of the U.S. population and seven times the number of wiretaps is not able to show better results, can there be hope for the United States? If anything, Germany has shown that an overreliance on technical methods keeps authorities from using basic detective tools to weed out terrorist elements. The same can already be seen in the United States, where some of the major successes in the war on terror have come through concerned community members who alert authorities to suspicious activity.

Given the German experience, why does the United States think it can make better use of more surveillance? Perhaps U.S. authorities have better technologies at their beck and call. But perhaps its just a matter of appearances: If the government can argue that it is using surveillance technology to keep tabs on terrorists, it can argue that it is doing something proactive. Based on these German lessons, however, the United States should think twice before adopting the false security blanket that more surveillance means more success in fighting terror.