Your Name Is Already in There
You don’t have to have done anything. That’s the part that should unsettle you. No drug conviction, no criminal record, no history of organized protest—just the wrong frame on a camera, the wrong street corner at the wrong demonstration, and somewhere inside a German police database there’s a file with your name attached to it.
According to reporting by Netzpolitik, 700,000 people are registered under "drug offenses" alone. Half of those are people whose only contact with a controlled substance was cannabis—a gram, years ago, a case the prosecutor dropped before it went anywhere. The case is closed. The data stays.
Photographer Florian Boillot ended up in databases labeled "left-wing violence" and "politically motivated crime." Not for throwing anything. For telling a police officer who’d shoved him that he intended to file a complaint. The complaint threat was the offense. Photographer Björn Kietzmann has an entirely clean criminal record. He appears in political police databases eighteen times anyway—once because he happened to be standing near a firecracker when it went off, and the officer present decided that was sufficient grounds to list him.
These cases came to light because journalists started being denied press accreditation at political events—flagged by systems that remembered they’d photographed a demonstration a decade earlier. That’s how the scale became visible: not through a whistleblower, but through the practical inconveniences it started causing people prominent enough to notice. Everyone else is presumably still in there, unaware. I’ve been to enough street protests to find that less abstract than it probably should be.
Most people who appear in these databases have no idea. You can find out by filing a self-disclosure request with the relevant authorities. Selbstauskunft.net walks through the process—what to request, where to send it, how to follow up. If you’ve been stopped or photographed at demonstrations across multiple German states, you’d need to contact each state’s criminal investigation office separately.
The bureaucratic effort required to check whether you’ve been wrongly catalogued is itself a kind of punishment. Write letters. Provide certified copies of your ID. Wait. Receive something vague in return. The data exists. You were somewhere near something. That was apparently enough.