Two Calls a Minute

Two phone calls per minute. That’s how many Berlin cops are listening in on, every single minute, according to their annual report. Not some paranoid thing—official numbers. A million-plus taps in one year. And most of it is drugs.

A third of every surveillance order is drug-related. The coke guy, the weed guy, the dealer at the club with the ’special supplements’ he swears are vitamins. People calling with those pathetic code phrases like the cops can’t figure them out. ’Yeah I need some groceries,’ ’I’m picking up that thing.’ Everyone thinking they’re cleverer than they are.

They approve everything. Nine years of wiretap requests in Berlin—14,476 total—and they rejected one. One. Since 2007. Everything else gets stamped through. Internet surveillance doubled in a single year. The system just keeps expanding, feeding on itself.

So somewhere someone’s listening to a phone call you made. Or will be. You call your guy, text someone the wrong thing, say something thoughtless in front of your apartment’s wifi and now you’re a data point. You don’t know if you’re actually on a list. That’s the trick of it. The uncertainty beats certainty. You could be completely fine or already tagged and you’d never know until the wrong moment.

I had a friend who got picked up for something minor, and it turned out his whole friend group had been under surveillance for months before anything happened. He wasn’t the target. He was just adjacent. That’s how it works. You get swept up because you know the wrong person or said something that scanned wrong on the filter.

The rational response is probably to not care, or use Signal, or stop talking on phones about anything interesting. But nobody actually does that. You live your life like they’re not listening because what else are you going to do—become someone who thinks about their words? It’s exhausting even to imagine.