Getting Used to It

Your face is being scanned at Berlin’s Südkreuz station. The camera doesn’t introduce itself. Just checks whether you match a watch list, decides within milliseconds. Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière is testing this technology with plans to expand it nationwide. He’s already thinking through how it works everywhere.

He insists it’s not invasive. You’re not being stored in some grand database—just checked against existing watch lists. Your face becomes a yes-or-no decision in milliseconds. Six months of testing, then they’ll work out the legal framework and begin rolling it out. That legal framework part is the diplomatic way of saying: we know this is a power, we just need to make it sound defensible.

The security argument makes sense if you don’t examine it too closely. Cameras are everywhere already. They’re useful for understanding crimes after they happen. This is just the same camera, except it thinks for itself first. Simple logic. And most people don’t look deeper.

What’s strange is the automation. A human reviewing footage is one thing. A system that looks at you and reaches a judgment instantly, without anyone in between—that’s different. The technology barely works now. It fails constantly in testing, flags wrong people, misses obvious matches. But that doesn’t matter much. In a year it’ll work better. By then we’ll have stopped noticing.

The security-versus-freedom argument is exhausted. I don’t want to be processed this way. I understand why someone thinks it’s necessary. Neither thought changes what gets built. The infrastructure gets installed. It stays. It improves. And somehow everyone becomes comfortable with it.

What bothers me most is how quickly I’m already not bothering to think about it anymore. That might be the real victory. Not that we agree with the surveillance, just that we stop paying attention long enough for it to become normal.