German authorities given right to examine asylum seekers' mobiles in deportation crackdown
GERMANY is amending its laws to give officials the right to examine the mobiles of asylum seekers in a bid to speed up deportations of 213,000 people whose right to stay has been denied.
German authorities to examine asylum seekers' mobiles
Under current legislation police and immigration can only look into the telephones of refugees if they are suspected of committing a crime or if they consent to the search.
The mobiles, authorities say, could swiftly clear up the backlog by pinpointing the real nationalities of the suspect migrants.
Germany amends its laws to give officials the right the examine the mobiles of asylum seekers
Without a true identity, they cannot be deported.
Now the interior ministry is presenting a bill to the national parliament which is expected to be passed unopposed giving the Bamf - the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees - software to read the data cards of thousands of mobile phone users daily.
It's in a bid to speed up deportations of 213,000 people whose right to stay has been denied
The software will also be deployed to try to trace refugees who have vanished off the radar and may be "sleepers" of the Islamic State.
Yesterday it was revealed that in the state of Brandenburg alone more than 3,000 migrants have disappeared and are unaccounted for.
Ever since the Christmas market massacre in Berlin - when Isis operative and bogus asylum seekers Anis Amri killed 12 and injured dozens more by driving a hijacked lorry into a crowd of revelers - Germany has been scrambling to tighten security.
Amri, a Tunisian who was shot dead five days after the December 19 attack after fleeing to Italy, had used 14 aliases to fool authorities in the country.
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Tapping into mobile phone data will lead to friends, acquaintances, relatives in the true homeland of refugees.
Authorities also believe it will be instrumental in cracking down on massive monetary fraud committed by some migrants using multiple identities in many different towns to draw benefits.