Germany's newest method of fighting corruption

“Berliner-zeiterung” reports that the anti-corruption machine that was produced by IBM monitors officials' payments and financial transactions by looking for abnormalities that later become the target of the investigation.

Prosecutor Rüdiger Reiff explains that the programme could be used for example in the case of a state official to identify cases when he makes higher expenditures than legal revenues.

Watson is also built for monitoring private spending by officials, whether they are off-line or on weekends with online booking or electronic payments. The machine is able to identify even cases where officials placed under monitoring act with nicknames to hide the action.

The application of this machine has also sparked the first debates in Germany over the respect of private data from the programme in question, but also the possibility that any possible error of the platform would unfairly punish officials.

The German office for the protection of personal data questioned by the media has said there is no knowledge of the anticorruption programme.