VMaybe part of the problem is that they call themselves presidents. The heads of the subordinate authorities in the area of responsibility of the Federal Ministry of the Interior are civil servants, but they sometimes behave differently. Thomas de Maizière, Minister of the Interior until 2018, described the leadership of the presidents as a “challenge” in his book “Governing” and warned that they should not develop a “life of their own”. Just like Hans-Georg Maassen. He was disloyal and had to vacate the post at the head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Federal Police President Dieter Romann is considered counted and at the same time indispensable. The criteria by which a president is not to be kept are unclear. This is also shown by the case of Arne Schönbohm, the President of the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), who now has to vacate his position.
Schönbohm’s story has different levels. At first glance, his departure is a reaction to the reporting in “ZDF Magazin Royale”. The program discussed Schönbohm’s contacts with the “Cyber Security Council Germany” association. This is not a revelation in itself, because Schönbohm founded the club himself in 2012. The idea was to create a cybersecurity network. The members include operators of critical infrastructure, some federal states, municipalities, the Federal Ministry of Health and large and medium-sized companies. The previous government was already angry about the name. “Cyber Security Council Germany” does not sound like a private association, but like a state institution – in fact, there is a National Cyber Security Council founded by the federal government in 2011.
The real trouble only set in when Schönbohm had resigned as president of the association. That was in 2016 when he became BSI President. His successor at the head of the club, Hans-Wilhelm Dünn, declared on Monday that it was “absurd” that his club had contacts with Russian authorities. But his behavior raises some questions. In 2019, Dünn took part in an international conference in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which, according to reports in the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit”, was used by Russian services to intensify contacts. At the conference, Thin’s association signed a joint declaration of intent on the peaceful use of information technology together with the Russian association “National Association for Cyber Security”. In an interview with RBB that same year, Dünn spoke of the importance of communicating with “all the relevant players,” including Russia and China.
A year later, Protelion GmbH was incorporated into the association, which at that time still traded under the name Infotecs GmbH. On Monday, the club announced that it had started an exclusion process against Protelion. The company, which offers security software, is a subsidiary of the Russian cybersecurity company OAO Infotecs, which was founded by a former employee of the Russian intelligence service KGB, according to information from the research network Policy Network Analytics.
