German Minister of Justice Marco Buschmann (FDP) brought a breath of fresh air to the data retention debate in Germany this week. For a long time now, the liberal FDP party wanted to abandon the idea of general data retention that does not require a specific reason, as favored by Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD). According to the draft Buschmann presented, Germany wants to go a significantly different way than the EU with a quick freeze approach. Falk Steiner has analyzed the draft.
In the wake of the stake of the Chinese state-owned shipping company Cosco in a Hamburg port terminal, another possible takeover with Chinese involvement is now causing a stir. The Chinese-Swedish company Silex Microsystems wants to buy a German chip manufacturer, of all things. Finn Meyer-Kuckuk has taken a look at whether this takeover is actually so problematic.
The end of the combustion engine was sealed very quickly in the end. It took the negotiators of the co-legislators less than five hours in the trilogue to agree on its phase-out in 2035, which defined automotive engineering for 120 years and brought great prosperity, especially for German manufacturers. To mark the end of the era for good, Parliament and member states still have to sign off on the informal compromise. A formality.
Times of crisis generally do not leave research unaffected. Whether energy shortages or budget cuts, research institutes and their projects also suffer from both. As head of the Europe office of the Leibniz Association, Claudia Labisch represents the interests of Germany’s 97 Leibniz institutes. In today’s Profile, I introduce the Nuremberg native.
The debate about the retention of connection and location data has been going on for almost two decades – in Germany and in the EU. As the technology evolved, courts successively placed tight limits on national implementations and the underlying EU regulation. Always opposed to large-scale retention: the liberal FDP and the Greens. Now they govern Germany together with the social democratic SPD, the political weight has shifted in their favor. Responsible for the dossier is Federal Justice Minister Marco Buschmann (FDP).
Buschmann shows fighting spirit when it comes to the future or the end of data retention: On Tuesday, his house submitted the draft bill to the cabinet vote. With it, Buschmann wants to abandon general retention of connection and location data in favor of an incident-based retention regime. The draft envisages that, as soon as the suspicion of a serious criminal offense exists, telecommunications operators can be ordered to store connection and location data.
If the data previously “frozen” at the telecommunications provider is then required for further investigations, the data can then be “unfrozen”. In general, location data, for example from mobile networks, may only be used up to the time the order is issued and is only possible after it has been frozen if it is essential for criminal investigation or to determine the suspect’s whereabouts.
This would raise the hurdles, albeit not endlessly. According to the draft bill, crimes involving computers are exempt if there are no other means of investigation – they are not covered by the quick freeze procedure.
With this relatively tight draft, Buschmann drew criticism from the SPD coalition partner: Interior Minister Nancy Faeser would have preferred to see the maximum framework provided by the European Court of Justice utilized to the full. She would favor a data retention system that did not require a specific reason or suspicion, particularly at sensitive locations such as train stations and airports.
And Faeser would also welcome the retention of IP addresses without a specific reason, which the ECJ also ruled to be legal to a certain extent. However, her negotiating position is poor: Without a new regulation, data retention is not possible in Germany – and the government coalition agreement sets conditions for a new regulation that is hardly compatible with mass surveillance. And the issue has also been toxic within the SPD itself for the past decade: digital politicians and the Young Socialists in particular have repeatedly opposed data retention.
What is clear, however, is that many EU member states will take a different path than Germany. Some member states have already been pushing for a new Europe-wide regulation in the past few months. At the same time, the European situation is very uneven: Comparable to Germany, the respective national data retention in some member states has been declared illegal in its respective form by national courts or the European Court of Justice. Austria already has a retention system in place similar to the German quick freeze proposal.
Denmark and Belgium passed new laws after the first rulings that are primarily more specific than the previous regulations. However, these could once again be dropped after the last ECJ ruling, as they too do not meet all the criteria of the Luxembourg judges according to the ruling on the German legal situation. In France, the government simply claimed that the overall national security situation was so critical that data retention was legal – and so far the EU Commission, as guardian of the treaties, did not raise any noticeable criticism.
However, a reintroduction of general, warrantless data retention at the EU level is currently not expected, as this would not be compatible with European law under the ECJ rulings. However, Chloé Berthélemy of the civil rights organization European Digital Rights (EDRI) expects that some member states will strive for uniform standards for IP address data retention. There are repeated rumors that such a standard could be included in the ePrivacy Regulation, which is now almost five years overdue.
However, the responsible parliamentary rapporteur Birgit Sippel (SPD/S&D) clearly rejected this at the SPD Economic Forum on Wednesday: “If there is to be a new version, a separate law would be needed for this.” But whether common criteria, for example in the form of a standardized quick freeze implementation could be agreed Europe-wide, is also open at the moment. For the civil rights activists at EDRI, that would be a desirable outcome.
“We believe this is an approach that is proportionate and protects personal data stored by private companies from unlawful police access, while providing an effective tool when data is needed for law enforcement purposes,” Berthélemy says. However, the access rules for the police and the judiciary would have to be taken into account, including court warrants
Here, the regulations in the Production and Preservation Orders for electronic evidence in criminal matters could serve as the basis for a cross-border approach in the EU, said Berthélemy. According to Birgit Sippel, who is also negotiating this dossier for the Parliament in the trilogue, the e-Evidence Directive is now close to completion – the member states still have to sign off on it, but the final trilogue for agreement could then take place in December.
Just a few days after the decision on Cosco’s stake in a Hamburg port, another potential takeover with Chinese participation sparked a new debate. This time, it is about a plant owned by the Dortmund-based semiconductor manufacturer Elmos. Back in December of last year, the company announced it would cede wafer manufacturing to Swedish-Chinese competitor Silex Microsystems. The government wants to approve the takeover, Handelsblatt reported on Thursday, citing government sources in Berlin. The Elmos takeover requires government approval.
So far, the government sees no problem with the acquisition. There are several good reasons:
The company Elmos is not necessarily booming, although the key data sound promising at first glance. The company specializes in chips used in the automotive industry. One company focus is on components that execute a fixed code. This differentiates them from processors that can execute any code and memory chips that can not execute code at all. They are useful for cars and also inexpensive.
But the plant in Dortmund produces semiconductor components with a structure width of 350 nanometers, which is very large compared to current standards. The technological front just moved to 7-nanometer for high-performance chips. In the automotive industry, chips with a structure width of 90 nanometers are typically used in advanced models, although the segment with over 250 nanometers continues to play a significant role.
However, the approval of the deal would run counter to the trend in the semiconductor business to bring more production back to Europe. The EU and Germany are currently pulling out all the stops to bring more semiconductor production back home. Handing over a plant that produces chips for the battered auto industry, of all things, does not fit into the concept. Moreover, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, sensitivity to dependence on autocracies has greatly increased. More discussions of this kind can be expected in the coming months as the media and politicians expose further examples of the transfer of important assets to foreign powers.
The Taiwanese chip market leader TSMC is in talks about opening a factory in the EU. Among other things, it is expected to produce chip types that will be in demand by the automotive industry in the coming years. One potential site is near Dresden. In Japan, TSMC is already building a plant in cooperation with Sony, with sights on customers such as Toyota and Nissan.
A TSMC factory in Germany would not only be on a different scale than the Elmos factory, it would also play on a completely different level. TSMC is a technology leader with business relationships to industry giants across all sectors. However, suspicion of Chinese partnerships is growing regardless. According to the Handelsblatt report, the German Federal Intelligence Service urges not to hand over the Elmos factory to Silex.
Germany and the EU have even been comparatively open to China so far. The US government under Joe Biden already imposed a blockade against the Chinese semiconductor industry. Not only technology exchange, but also mutual business is hardly possible anymore. Suppliers from third countries are also withdrawing from China in part out of fear of the wrath of the United States. For example, the South Korean manufacturer SK Hynix considers selling off its factory in Wuxi. It is hard to operate without overlapping with US partners. The takeover of a US semiconductor site by a Chinese player would be downright unthinkable now.
The Elmos affair brings back memories of Aixtron, a medium-sized company from Aachen, Germany, which was put up for sale in 2016. The company, previously unknown to the public, was supposed to be sold to the state-owned Fujian Grand Chip Investment Fund from Xiamen for a triple-digit million amount. The German Economy Ministry first approved the takeover. However, a veto from America, an important market for Aixtron, killed the deal. German Economics Minister Sigmar at the time ordered another review of the investment, but this time it was denied.
Aixtron is certainly more valuable and vital than Elmos. But the lesson to be learned from this case was to be much more careful about such transactions, especially since the other big wake-up call in the form of the takeover of the robot manufacturer Kuka came in the same year. These days, by the way, Aixtron is glad to not have been sold to the state-owned financial investor with strategic ulterior motives. The company found its way into the technology future without Chinese money.
Claudia Labisch’s job is like herding a bag of fleas, even if she would probably never put it that way. As head of the Leibniz Association‘s Europe office, she represents the interests of 97 independent German Leibniz research institutes in Brussels. Their research areas range from natural sciences, engineering and environmental sciences to economics, spatial sciences, social sciences and the humanities.
It is not always easy to find the largest possible overlap of common interests. “Especially at the end of the year, when the Commission empties its drawers and wants to check off open items on its agenda, things can get more stressful,” Labisch says.
Whenever the European Commission launches a new research framework program, such as most recently Horizon Europe, Labisch and her team accompany this process. They try to bring in the interests of the Leibniz Association. The Framework Programme 9 for Research and Innovation runs from 2021 to 2027 and boasts a budget of €95.5 billion. “No sooner is a program like this launched than we are already back to preparing the interim evaluation,” says Labisch.
With concern, she observes that crises also increasingly define the political agenda in research. Since the economic crisis of 2008, she said, there has been an increased focus on industry and technology funding. “Concrete results are supposed to be delivered quickly. This is at the expense of human or social sciences and knowledge-oriented basic research in general. Their results are often not immediately recognizable or usable, but rather in the long term.”
Although the EU conducts excellent basic research with the European Research Council, “an absolute success story,” as Labisch sees it. But the focus here is primarily on individual funding. “Transnational collaborative research falls somewhat by the wayside here,” says Labisch. On top of that: In our current time of multiple crises, member countries often cut back on research first.
On the one hand, this will make competition for EU research funds tougher. “On the other hand, EU research infrastructures that have been built up in recent years and are now leaving project status need financial commitment from member states right now, otherwise they have no chance as European research infrastructures,” says Labisch.
If a Leibniz institute wants to apply for EU funding or build up EU expertise at its research site, Labisch, a trained translator for English and French, provides strategic advice and explains the “Brussels system” to them. What needs to be considered when submitting an application? Where does she see the potential for successful fundraising, and how should institutes position themselves?
If the EU Commission plans specific legislative projects, Labisch must always keep in mind which research area and which institutes could be affected, and how she can help shape the processes in a way that benefits the institutions. In doing so, she also builds alliances with other European research organizations in order to develop and represent mutual positions. Lisa-Martina Klein
German Minister of Justice Marco Buschmann (FDP) brought a breath of fresh air to the data retention debate in Germany this week. For a long time now, the liberal FDP party wanted to abandon the idea of general data retention that does not require a specific reason, as favored by Interior Minister Nancy Faeser (SPD). According to the draft Buschmann presented, Germany wants to go a significantly different way than the EU with a quick freeze approach. Falk Steiner has analyzed the draft.
In the wake of the stake of the Chinese state-owned shipping company Cosco in a Hamburg port terminal, another possible takeover with Chinese involvement is now causing a stir. The Chinese-Swedish company Silex Microsystems wants to buy a German chip manufacturer, of all things. Finn Meyer-Kuckuk has taken a look at whether this takeover is actually so problematic.
The end of the combustion engine was sealed very quickly in the end. It took the negotiators of the co-legislators less than five hours in the trilogue to agree on its phase-out in 2035, which defined automotive engineering for 120 years and brought great prosperity, especially for German manufacturers. To mark the end of the era for good, Parliament and member states still have to sign off on the informal compromise. A formality.
Times of crisis generally do not leave research unaffected. Whether energy shortages or budget cuts, research institutes and their projects also suffer from both. As head of the Europe office of the Leibniz Association, Claudia Labisch represents the interests of Germany’s 97 Leibniz institutes. In today’s Profile, I introduce the Nuremberg native.
The debate about the retention of connection and location data has been going on for almost two decades – in Germany and in the EU. As the technology evolved, courts successively placed tight limits on national implementations and the underlying EU regulation. Always opposed to large-scale retention: the liberal FDP and the Greens. Now they govern Germany together with the social democratic SPD, the political weight has shifted in their favor. Responsible for the dossier is Federal Justice Minister Marco Buschmann (FDP).
Buschmann shows fighting spirit when it comes to the future or the end of data retention: On Tuesday, his house submitted the draft bill to the cabinet vote. With it, Buschmann wants to abandon general retention of connection and location data in favor of an incident-based retention regime. The draft envisages that, as soon as the suspicion of a serious criminal offense exists, telecommunications operators can be ordered to store connection and location data.
If the data previously “frozen” at the telecommunications provider is then required for further investigations, the data can then be “unfrozen”. In general, location data, for example from mobile networks, may only be used up to the time the order is issued and is only possible after it has been frozen if it is essential for criminal investigation or to determine the suspect’s whereabouts.
This would raise the hurdles, albeit not endlessly. According to the draft bill, crimes involving computers are exempt if there are no other means of investigation – they are not covered by the quick freeze procedure.
With this relatively tight draft, Buschmann drew criticism from the SPD coalition partner: Interior Minister Nancy Faeser would have preferred to see the maximum framework provided by the European Court of Justice utilized to the full. She would favor a data retention system that did not require a specific reason or suspicion, particularly at sensitive locations such as train stations and airports.
And Faeser would also welcome the retention of IP addresses without a specific reason, which the ECJ also ruled to be legal to a certain extent. However, her negotiating position is poor: Without a new regulation, data retention is not possible in Germany – and the government coalition agreement sets conditions for a new regulation that is hardly compatible with mass surveillance. And the issue has also been toxic within the SPD itself for the past decade: digital politicians and the Young Socialists in particular have repeatedly opposed data retention.
What is clear, however, is that many EU member states will take a different path than Germany. Some member states have already been pushing for a new Europe-wide regulation in the past few months. At the same time, the European situation is very uneven: Comparable to Germany, the respective national data retention in some member states has been declared illegal in its respective form by national courts or the European Court of Justice. Austria already has a retention system in place similar to the German quick freeze proposal.
Denmark and Belgium passed new laws after the first rulings that are primarily more specific than the previous regulations. However, these could once again be dropped after the last ECJ ruling, as they too do not meet all the criteria of the Luxembourg judges according to the ruling on the German legal situation. In France, the government simply claimed that the overall national security situation was so critical that data retention was legal – and so far the EU Commission, as guardian of the treaties, did not raise any noticeable criticism.
However, a reintroduction of general, warrantless data retention at the EU level is currently not expected, as this would not be compatible with European law under the ECJ rulings. However, Chloé Berthélemy of the civil rights organization European Digital Rights (EDRI) expects that some member states will strive for uniform standards for IP address data retention. There are repeated rumors that such a standard could be included in the ePrivacy Regulation, which is now almost five years overdue.
However, the responsible parliamentary rapporteur Birgit Sippel (SPD/S&D) clearly rejected this at the SPD Economic Forum on Wednesday: “If there is to be a new version, a separate law would be needed for this.” But whether common criteria, for example in the form of a standardized quick freeze implementation could be agreed Europe-wide, is also open at the moment. For the civil rights activists at EDRI, that would be a desirable outcome.
“We believe this is an approach that is proportionate and protects personal data stored by private companies from unlawful police access, while providing an effective tool when data is needed for law enforcement purposes,” Berthélemy says. However, the access rules for the police and the judiciary would have to be taken into account, including court warrants
Here, the regulations in the Production and Preservation Orders for electronic evidence in criminal matters could serve as the basis for a cross-border approach in the EU, said Berthélemy. According to Birgit Sippel, who is also negotiating this dossier for the Parliament in the trilogue, the e-Evidence Directive is now close to completion – the member states still have to sign off on it, but the final trilogue for agreement could then take place in December.
Just a few days after the decision on Cosco’s stake in a Hamburg port, another potential takeover with Chinese participation sparked a new debate. This time, it is about a plant owned by the Dortmund-based semiconductor manufacturer Elmos. Back in December of last year, the company announced it would cede wafer manufacturing to Swedish-Chinese competitor Silex Microsystems. The government wants to approve the takeover, Handelsblatt reported on Thursday, citing government sources in Berlin. The Elmos takeover requires government approval.
So far, the government sees no problem with the acquisition. There are several good reasons:
The company Elmos is not necessarily booming, although the key data sound promising at first glance. The company specializes in chips used in the automotive industry. One company focus is on components that execute a fixed code. This differentiates them from processors that can execute any code and memory chips that can not execute code at all. They are useful for cars and also inexpensive.
But the plant in Dortmund produces semiconductor components with a structure width of 350 nanometers, which is very large compared to current standards. The technological front just moved to 7-nanometer for high-performance chips. In the automotive industry, chips with a structure width of 90 nanometers are typically used in advanced models, although the segment with over 250 nanometers continues to play a significant role.
However, the approval of the deal would run counter to the trend in the semiconductor business to bring more production back to Europe. The EU and Germany are currently pulling out all the stops to bring more semiconductor production back home. Handing over a plant that produces chips for the battered auto industry, of all things, does not fit into the concept. Moreover, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, sensitivity to dependence on autocracies has greatly increased. More discussions of this kind can be expected in the coming months as the media and politicians expose further examples of the transfer of important assets to foreign powers.
The Taiwanese chip market leader TSMC is in talks about opening a factory in the EU. Among other things, it is expected to produce chip types that will be in demand by the automotive industry in the coming years. One potential site is near Dresden. In Japan, TSMC is already building a plant in cooperation with Sony, with sights on customers such as Toyota and Nissan.
A TSMC factory in Germany would not only be on a different scale than the Elmos factory, it would also play on a completely different level. TSMC is a technology leader with business relationships to industry giants across all sectors. However, suspicion of Chinese partnerships is growing regardless. According to the Handelsblatt report, the German Federal Intelligence Service urges not to hand over the Elmos factory to Silex.
Germany and the EU have even been comparatively open to China so far. The US government under Joe Biden already imposed a blockade against the Chinese semiconductor industry. Not only technology exchange, but also mutual business is hardly possible anymore. Suppliers from third countries are also withdrawing from China in part out of fear of the wrath of the United States. For example, the South Korean manufacturer SK Hynix considers selling off its factory in Wuxi. It is hard to operate without overlapping with US partners. The takeover of a US semiconductor site by a Chinese player would be downright unthinkable now.
The Elmos affair brings back memories of Aixtron, a medium-sized company from Aachen, Germany, which was put up for sale in 2016. The company, previously unknown to the public, was supposed to be sold to the state-owned Fujian Grand Chip Investment Fund from Xiamen for a triple-digit million amount. The German Economy Ministry first approved the takeover. However, a veto from America, an important market for Aixtron, killed the deal. German Economics Minister Sigmar at the time ordered another review of the investment, but this time it was denied.
Aixtron is certainly more valuable and vital than Elmos. But the lesson to be learned from this case was to be much more careful about such transactions, especially since the other big wake-up call in the form of the takeover of the robot manufacturer Kuka came in the same year. These days, by the way, Aixtron is glad to not have been sold to the state-owned financial investor with strategic ulterior motives. The company found its way into the technology future without Chinese money.
Claudia Labisch’s job is like herding a bag of fleas, even if she would probably never put it that way. As head of the Leibniz Association‘s Europe office, she represents the interests of 97 independent German Leibniz research institutes in Brussels. Their research areas range from natural sciences, engineering and environmental sciences to economics, spatial sciences, social sciences and the humanities.
It is not always easy to find the largest possible overlap of common interests. “Especially at the end of the year, when the Commission empties its drawers and wants to check off open items on its agenda, things can get more stressful,” Labisch says.
Whenever the European Commission launches a new research framework program, such as most recently Horizon Europe, Labisch and her team accompany this process. They try to bring in the interests of the Leibniz Association. The Framework Programme 9 for Research and Innovation runs from 2021 to 2027 and boasts a budget of €95.5 billion. “No sooner is a program like this launched than we are already back to preparing the interim evaluation,” says Labisch.
With concern, she observes that crises also increasingly define the political agenda in research. Since the economic crisis of 2008, she said, there has been an increased focus on industry and technology funding. “Concrete results are supposed to be delivered quickly. This is at the expense of human or social sciences and knowledge-oriented basic research in general. Their results are often not immediately recognizable or usable, but rather in the long term.”
Although the EU conducts excellent basic research with the European Research Council, “an absolute success story,” as Labisch sees it. But the focus here is primarily on individual funding. “Transnational collaborative research falls somewhat by the wayside here,” says Labisch. On top of that: In our current time of multiple crises, member countries often cut back on research first.
On the one hand, this will make competition for EU research funds tougher. “On the other hand, EU research infrastructures that have been built up in recent years and are now leaving project status need financial commitment from member states right now, otherwise they have no chance as European research infrastructures,” says Labisch.
If a Leibniz institute wants to apply for EU funding or build up EU expertise at its research site, Labisch, a trained translator for English and French, provides strategic advice and explains the “Brussels system” to them. What needs to be considered when submitting an application? Where does she see the potential for successful fundraising, and how should institutes position themselves?
If the EU Commission plans specific legislative projects, Labisch must always keep in mind which research area and which institutes could be affected, and how she can help shape the processes in a way that benefits the institutions. In doing so, she also builds alliances with other European research organizations in order to develop and represent mutual positions. Lisa-Martina Klein
