Overview

• Bavaria’s Landeskriminalamt reports 97 VeRA deployments since September 2024 to prevent severe crimes, a usage now being tested against Karlsruhe’s 2023 automated-analysis limits.
• On July 23, the Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte backed by the Chaos Computer Club filed a constitutional complaint at the Federal Constitutional Court arguing that VeRA sweeps in data on uninvolved witnesses, victims and other citizens.
• Baden-Württemberg signed a five-year, €24 million Palantir contract in March before lawmakers amended its police law, and the software cannot go live until coalition partners resolve procedural disputes.
• Hesse’s ‘Hessendata’ has used a Palantir-adapted platform since 2017 to aid counterterror and child-abuse investigations, and North Rhine-Westphalia’s Gotham variant has operated under a 2022 police-law overhaul with access to 12 databases.
• Data-protection officers, opposition parties and the CCC warn of opaque vendor dependency and demand stricter oversight or a domestic alternative; state interior ministries counter that data stay on local servers and audits show no backdoors.