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Bavarian police can use controversial analysis software from Palantir

According to the Fraunhofer Institute, the Bavarian police's new analysis software can be used without any data protection concerns.

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Bavarian police can use controversial analysis software from Palantir

According to the Fraunhofer Institute, the Bavarian police's new analysis software can be used without any data protection concerns. "No so-called backdoor was identified in the software," said the State Criminal Police Office in Munich on Wednesday. In concrete terms, this means that the investigation did not identify any functionality that would allow data to be leaked illegally while circumventing access restrictions or allow unauthorized access to the system from outside.

"These findings confirm our assessment that VeRA can be operated by the Bavarian police without any serious security concerns," emphasized the State Criminal Police Office (LKA). Actually, the results of the Fraunhofer study should have been available by the end of last year. The program of the controversial US company Palantir should not be used by the investigators for that long.

The program examined by the expert is the cross-procedural research and analysis system (VeRA), which is to be used as a search index for all police databases in Bavaria. It is intended to help with investigations into serious crime, terrorism or murder, but also with gang theft and child pornography.

The program, which could potentially be used nationwide, combs through the various police databases to discover cross-connections that investigators might otherwise never notice. This should help the police to track down potential perpetrators before they can commit a crime. The Free State of Bavaria has concluded a framework agreement with Palantir so that all other police forces can adopt its program without additional procurement procedures.

The report and the contents were classified as classified information by the LKA, if only because of the sensitive information on the IT infrastructure of the Bavarian police. In addition, the report contained business secrets of Palantir Technologies. A publication or even partial inspection is therefore not legally permissible and not intended.

According to the information, the report is based on a "broad and well-founded methodical approach to the comprehensive testing of the software". The investigation did not only focus on the source code of the software itself. Among other things, a vulnerability analysis was also carried out, in which, in addition to manual checks and penetration tests, code scanners were also used for automated vulnerability detection.

Critics had feared that Palantir could use the program to divert data from the police - partly because the company received money from the CIA as a start-up and later counted the US foreign intelligence service among its customers.

The police in Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia are already using Palantir programs for investigations. The Federal Constitutional Court had ruled in mid-February that automated data evaluation was fundamentally possible under restrictive conditions. Bavaria's Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann (CSU) then announced that he wanted to introduce the necessary legal basis in the Police Tasks Act (PAG) on the basis of the judgement.

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