The Berlin police are examining the possibility of data being passed on to a lawyer close to the lateral thinking alliance. This was confirmed by a spokeswoman for the authority on Tuesday’s Tagesspiegel request.
The Berlin representative for data protection and freedom of information, Maja Smoltczyk, is also involved. According to the police, a “precautionary notification” was received by Smoltczyk on Monday afternoon, a spokeswoman told Tagesspiegel. The investigation of the incident is ongoing, it is still too early to assess the content.
The data allegedly passed on is information about organizers of protests against a lateral thinking demonstration on August 1st in Berlin. Specifically, it is about their names and extracts from the criminal record. The lawyer himself had made the case public. In a video that appeared in social networks last Friday, he said he had gained insight into personal data of counter-demonstrators in police files.
The files were presented to the lawyer in the course of a file inspection before the Berlin Administrative Court. There, in turn, the lawyer had sued against the premature termination of the lateral thinking demonstration on August 1st. The data come from a risk analysis of the demonstration events on that day in Berlin. It was made by the State Security Department of the State Criminal Police Office.
While the Berlin police currently sees no evidence of data being passed on to the lawyer, Dominic Hörauf, deputy press spokesman for the administrative court, declared that the authority – in this case the police – was responsible for data protection in administrative files. This also applies to the corresponding blackening of personal data of third parties. Sending the file to the administrative court in the course of inspecting the file does not change anything.
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Sebastian Schluesselburg, legal policy spokesman for the Left parliamentary group in the House of Representatives, said: “It cannot be that parts of files with sensitive personal data are sent to the courts without being blackened. The police should have refused the submission for these sensitive elements. “
Schliisselburg asked the police to clarify whether the abundance of data on the demo registrants was even necessary for assessing the situation. His parliamentary group colleague Niklas Schrader and parliamentary group leader Anne Helm brought a written request on the way to clear up the case of the alleged data transfer. The Corona skeptics camp had recently become violently radicalized. Assaults on political opponents have been announced several times, and a reporter for the Tagesspiegel was threatened with death on the sidelines of a demonstration at the end of October.
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