Exberliner Issue 167, January 2018

TRAINS
SURVEILLANCE
In Berlin, surveillance in public transport might not
rival the ubiquitous CCTV in cities like London
and Paris, but don’t be fooled. With more cameras
on the U-Bahn, an increased police presence and a
new facial recognition pilot, we’re being watched
now more than ever before.
By Aske Hald Knudstrup
I
f you’ve visited the high-ceilinged glass-andsteel
Südkreuz train station in recent months,
you might have seen that something is different.
At the bottom of the escalators at the
northern entrance of the station you’ll easily
spot two large signs sticking to the tiles, indicating
a choice of where to go. Follow the white signs for
“Keine Gesichtserkennung” (no facial recognition);
follow the blue ones for a route that leads you right
under the government’s face scanners.
From last August until February, a quartet
consisting of the Interior Ministry, the Deutsche
Bahn, the Bundespolizei (federal police) and the
Bundeskriminalamt (federal criminal police office)
has been testing the use of “automated facial
recognition” in a pilot project aimed at finding
out how reliable cameras might be in detecting
and identifying people from a database. First, 300
regular Berlin commuters volunteered to have
their pictures taken. Now, three different software
operators are testing whether they can spot
anyone from that group among the thousands that
travel from Südkreuz every day. With 1150 cameras
in Berlin’s regional train and S-Bahn stations
and 2771 in the BVG’s U-Bahn stations, there’s a
lot of potential for facial recognition, should it be
implemented city wide. The goal, in the words of
Bundespolizei representative Matthias Lehmann, is
“to help recognise dangerous situations at an early
stage” and test whether cameras at train stations
can “immediately provide a safety benefit”. With
the system still in its test phase, the Bundespolizei
hasn’t specified which people might be included in
the database. But the unspoken hope is that in the
event of another terrorist attack like the one on
the Breitscheidplatz Christmas market in December
2016, their system would help them catch the
perpetrator before he or she left the country – or,
maybe, before he or she even committed the crime.
The police, the BVG and politicians all hearken back
to that truck attack as a watershed moment for how
Germans view security. Berlin is not yet in the same
league as Paris (around 10,000 cameras in the metro)
or London (over 15,000 cameras in the tube), but the
Bundespolizei and Deutsche Bahn aren’t the only ones
stepping up their surveillance game these days. The
BVG is investing €48.2 million to equip their stations
with modern video technology, meaning a total of
6500 cameras (one every 25 metres) that can pan,
zoom and tilt while delivering high-resolution pictures
to a central security office. Currently, BVG security
can see into every nook and cranny of 45 stations,
those deemed the busiest or most crime-ridden. By
the end of 2018, that should be true for each of the 173
stations on the network.
SAFETY OR PRIVACY?
Of course, the project has sparked concerns among
civil liberty campaigners and a debate on where
to draw the fine line between collective security
and individual privacy. Maja Smoltczyk, head of
the Berlin Commission for Data Protection and
Freedom of Information (BlnBDI), has openly
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EXBERLINER 167