It took authorities more than 30 years to hunt down one of Germany’s most wanted fugitives. For Michael Colborne, an investigative journalist who runs old photos through a facial recognition service, it took about 30 minutes.
At the request of a German podcasting duo, he was asked to look for matches to the decades-sought-after photos of Daniela Klette, a member of the left-wing militant group Red Army Faction, Germany’s most notorious post-war terrorist group, originally known as the Baader-Meinhof gang.
Instead, the facial recognition software he used stumbled upon a woman named Claudia Ivone. In one image, he posed with the local capoeira troupe as they waved their arms exuberantly. Another showed her in a white headdress, throwing flower petals to an Afro-Brazilian community at a local street festival.
He had stumbled upon an alias Ms Klette had used for years as she hid in plain sight in the German capital.
This week, German police announced they had finally caught Ms Klette, now 65, calling her arrest a “masterpiece” and a “landmark”. Some German journalists had a different interpretation of the events.
“What was their success?” asked a reporter, challenging officials at a news conference this week. “Listen to a podcast?”
It is not yet clear whether Mr. Colborne’s findings on the podcast, Legion, whose final season on Ms. Klette was released in December by Germany’s public broadcaster ARD, they actually led to the discovery of Ms Klette by the police. Police say they found her thanks to a tip in November, around the same time Mr. Colborne, 42, and the Legion were doing their investigation.
But it raised a difficult prospect: that a fugitive who had eluded German police since Mr. Colborne, a Canadian journalist who works for the investigative website Bellingcat, was in high school, was identified with relative ease using two publicly available programs, the PimEyes. and AWS Identification.
“Someone like me, who doesn’t speak German, who doesn’t know much beyond the basic background of Daniela Klette — Why was I able to find such a lead in literally 30 minutes?” he said. “There are hundreds of German far-right extremists with warrants out for their arrest. If I can find someone who has been on the run for 30 years, why can’t the German authorities find some of these other wanted men?’
The question comes at a time when Germans are increasingly worried about security. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Germans have been acutely aware of the dangers to Europe as it witnesses the biggest land war since World War II.
In late 2022, German intelligence discovered that one of their officers was working as a double agent, sending sensitive information about the war to Russia.
At the same time, police uncovered a network of conspiracy theorists with far-right ties who had concocted a violent and fanciful plot to storm the German parliament in the hope of sparking a coup.
Peter Neumann, a German professor of security studies at King’s College London, said a major flaw in Germany’s ability to hunt down extremists and militants has been overzealous enforcement of data protection laws, which many Germans attribute to a history of surveillance and repression of the country. the Nazis and in communist former East Germany.
“For 70 years now, this is a democratic state and it is really disadvantaged by its inability to obtain data, even for perfectly legitimate reasons,” Professor Neumann said.
German police, he argued, are hampering their own ability to fight crime through “over-compliance” or excessively strict laws. He said police are unable to record conversations between members of organized crime, for example, if they might be sitting next to someone in a restaurant having an innocent conversation that would also be overheard.
Another problem, he said, was that Germany has struggled and failed for years to digitize a government that remains stubbornly in charge of paper mail and even fax machines.
“They don’t necessarily even think about the presence of people in the virtual space,” he said. “Right-wing extremists, but also jihadists, are active online in messaging forums – places that the German authorities would not consider real. But they are definitely real.”
Ms. Klette is a holdover from a different era of security threats, when left-wing militancy was one of the most violent threats to society.
During her time in hiding, police say Ms. Klette and two accomplices, Ernst-Volker Staub and Burkhard Garweg, who are also wanted in connection with Red Army Faction activities, committed at least 13 violent robberies, paying off about two million euros. (just over $2.1 million).
Police are still looking for Mr Staub and Mr Garweg. They believe the two men are still in Berlin.
Mrs. Klette lived for years in the historically left-wing neighborhood of Kreuzberg. Neighbors told local reporters that she was a friendly, calm presence and was often seen with a large white dog. He taught local children and helped write letters, a neighbor told Bild, a tabloid. A friend, who sometimes visited, was said to be about the same age as Ms Klette and wore a long white ponytail.
A Brazilian woman living in Berlin posted on Facebook about her shock at discovering that a woman she had been doing capoeira with was a fugitive.
“If the German secret police had not found Daniela Klette, Brazilians would not have guessed that the capoeirista, who paraded in the Carnival of Cultures, is Germany’s most wanted national and international terrorist,” he wrote.
On Wednesday, after finding a grenade in her home, police evacuated the gray, nondescript, rent-controlled building on a street where the Berlin Wall once ran. The next day they discovered a grenade launcher and a Kalashnikov machine gun.
Kreuzberg, a rapidly gentrifying Berlin neighborhood, has a special history with the Red Army Faction. It was in a basement there that, in February 1975, the group held Peter Lorenz, Berlin’s political boss, for five days in what they called a “people’s prison.” Lorenz was only released after the West German government agreed to release several RAF insurgents in a trade.
It’s also the kind of neighborhood where well-paid government advisers live alongside Turkish immigrants, welfare recipients and artists, and where Berlin’s attitude of letting everyone live as they please is still strongly felt.
On Facebook, Ms. Klette mainly posted photos of flowers and posters advertising events at the Afro-Brazilian club in which she was active. It was these photos that eventually got her into trouble.
However, Mr. Colborne’s unintentionally successful identification of her for the Legion last winter initially came to nothing because the podcasters were unable to find the woman in the photos he had found.
His realization that his sleuth had indeed worked, he said, has inspired conflicting emotions. It shows the power, he said, of what someone using easily accessible software can do with a photo.
“You can find photos that they don’t even know were taken by them. You can find out where they lived, where they went to university,” he said. “I cannot stress enough that some of these tools can and will be further used by bad actors.”
