The caller sounds like her own daughter – but the voice was stolen. Artificial intelligence (AI) makes fraudulent shock calls even more insidious when voices are cloned and no longer distinguishable from the real ones. “This is possible without a lot of technical know-how,” says the AI coordinator at the Berlin State Criminal Police Office, Eugen Hofmann.
German security authorities are calling for AI tools to stop chasing digital crimes. “The police have to do something about this,” says LKA man Hofmann. Above all, the processing of huge amounts of data will be made easier in the future using algorithms, for example in investigations into child pornography.
From a researcher’s perspective, ATM busters or document forgers can also be tracked down with the help of AI. So far, however, there has often been a lack of practical use by the police – also due to high legal hurdles. A clear direction for the future has so far been difficult to discern.
“Patchwork” when it comes to AI in the state authorities
“It’s time for it to start,” says computer scientist Andreas Dengel. He is managing director of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Kaiserslautern, which cooperates with the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) and the LKA Rhineland-Palatinate and tests AI systems for police investigations. From the point of view of AI expert Dengel, there is currently a large patchwork of police authorities in the federal states. “There would have to be a national police commissioner to develop an AI strategy.”
Police want to analyze criminals’ shoe prints with AI
Some examples of research projects and AI tests for police work:
If ATM blasters, who destroyed more than 450 machines in Germany in 2023, leave behind shoe prints, Dengel believes that AI trained specifically for this purpose can be used. The patterns could then be assigned to specific types of shoes. So far, several thousand different shoe prints have already been collected nationwide, says Dengel. The goal: to identify perpetrators by the shoe tread. The system is about to be introduced, he hopes for 2024, says Dengel.
Use in document forgery and also in football?
According to the German Research Center in Kaiserslautern, the police can use new procedures to track down fake documents. An AI system can recognize the minimal differences between printers.
Video cameras that use algorithms and intelligent software to find suspicious movement patterns are also being tested in southern Germany and Hamburg, for example. The AI must be trained with data and images. Biometric data is not recorded, nor is the age, gender or ethnicity of people determined, as the Hamburg Interior Authority emphasized in 2023.
The Berlin AI coordinator at the Berlin LKA, Hofmann, also cites football stadiums as a possible example, in which rioters could be screened out with the help of facial recognition. However, the Berlin police do not have their own data models for this or other AI systems.
In connection with crimes on New Year’s Eve, the deputy state chairman of the police union in Hamburg, Lars Osburg, recently said: “It is no longer possible to explain why we have to deploy large numbers of forces to protect events, but rather to the opportunities offered by AI in the search for known criminals and dangerous people.”
Experts fear more manipulated videos and deepfakes
Cybersecurity expert Christian Dörr from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam sees the greatest danger in the near future in the fact that deepfakes are increasingly being used for disinformation campaigns with the help of artificial intelligence. Then it is not the Chancellor speaking in the video, but a digital twin.
Dörr believes that manipulation is used to influence elections and destabilize state systems. “The large hacker groups are nation-state driven. Of course, they also have a very, very great interest in AI.” In the summer of 2022, the then Governing Mayor of Berlin, Franziska Giffey (SPD), spoke via video to a person who looked like Kiev Mayor Vitali Klitschko, but was not Klitschko.
There are strict limits to the use of AI
However, there are also strict limits to the use of AI systems in police work. There are concerns because risks are also seen for innocent citizens and fundamental rights can be at risk.
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution had already declared regulations in Hesse and Hamburg to be unconstitutional. It’s about analysis software that police officers use to search various databases with one click in order to discover cross-connections in the huge amounts of data. According to the Hessian police, such an arrest was made in connection with a raid against Reich citizens. In December 2023, the EU agreed on stricter rules – this can also have consequences for AI instruments in the police. “If we wait until lawyers have a watertight text, it will take five years,” says Berlin LKA official Hofmann.
