\u201cThe worst part, really, is that so little information is being shared with us\u201d \u2014 Constanze Kurz, a computer scientist<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n In 2017, the ministry recruited around 300 volunteers who agreed, in exchange for a \u20ac25 Amazon voucher, to have their names and two biometric photos stored in a database and to carry a transponder around with them. This allowed authorities to know at what day and time they crossed through the station.<\/p>\n On August that year, the project, known as \u201cSafety Station S\u00fcdkreuz,\u201d took off. Standing in front of TV cameras, then-Interior Minister Thomas de Maizi\u00e8re went into raptures about why \u201cvideo surveillance is very important,\u201d and how the new systems could eventually help police with tracing criminal and terror suspects.<\/p>\n \u201cOn this scale, this is the first real-life test in Germany,\u201d he said. \u201cIm very excited to see the results so I can then provide a solid argument for using such facial recognition in the interest of protecting and securing the population.\u201d<\/p>\n It didnt take long for privacy advocates to cry foul.<\/p>\n A protester scans passers-by at Berlins S\u00fcdkreuz railway station. Facial recognition software is being tested there, in an attempt to identify terrorists and criminals entering and exiting the station | Imago Agency via Belga<\/p>\n The ministry and its partner Deutsche Bahn have been coy about details; both denied to be interviewed. But information from parliamentary inquiries and internal documents, as well as conversations with industry officials and technology experts, suggest that opposition is gathering momentum.<\/p>\n Critics of the project say it is insufficiently transparent and exposes citizens to invasions of privacy, especially if their data is kept on file.<\/p>\n \u201cThe worst part, really, is that so little information is being shared with us,\u201d said Constanze Kurz, a computer scientist and the spokesperson of Chaos Computer Club, Europes largest association of white-hat hackers.<\/p>\n She said that while officials sold the project as merely an updated version of old-school video surveillance, this was an attempt to distract from the fact that everyone who passes through a marked section of the station has their face scanned.<\/p>\n Legal experts add that if the technology on trial in Berlin S\u00fcdkreuz is ever deployed as part of an official law enforcement effort, it would violate German citizens right to privacy.<\/p>\n \u201cIf such technology was to go live, the state would grossly infringe the basic rights of its citizens,\u201d said Lea Voigt of the German Bar Association, which represents more than 64,000 lawyers, adding that \u201cthe technology that is tested has the potential to question in principle whether people can move anonymously through public space.\u201d<\/p>\n The firms providing the technology \u2014 three companies from France, Spain and Israel \u2014 declined or ignored formal interview requests, but conversations with employees under the condition of anonymity suggest that the companies agreed to alter their software so that any data that does not lead to a match would be deleted immediately.<\/p>\n As facial recognition tools mature, governments around the world \u2014 from authoritarian regimes to democratically elected governments \u2014 are looking into making them available to their law enforcement.<\/p>\n Most prominently, China has been turning more than 170 million cameras into a gigantic surveillance system<\/a>; in Europe, countries such as the United Kingdom have also run real-life trials<\/a>, on a much smaller scale.<\/p>\n In Germany, however, experience with two surveillance states in the 20th century \u2014 the Nazi and East German communist regimes \u2014 has made people particularly sensitive about protecting their privacy.<\/p>\n \u201cI dont want to withhold certain instruments from our security agencies, just because of the diffuse fear that they could be abused\u201d \u2014 Andrea Lindholz, German CSU MP<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n After the facial recognition experiment concluded in July, the trials second phase inside S\u00fcdkreuz, to be supervised by private railway company Deutsche Bahn, is set to start in November and will test programs that can spot suspicious behavior in video footage by analyzing it in real-time \u2014 potentially opening another Pandoras box of privacy concerns.<\/p>\n The programs will try to spot suspicious objects like unattended suitcases. They will sound the alarm when people enter areas where theyre not supposed to go or lay down on platforms or staircases. They will keep count of how many people are at the station. And they will watch out for unusual group behavior: If a large number of people, for example, abruptly starts to move in one direction, the program might see this as an indicator of a potentially dangerous situation.<\/p>\n Legal scholars and technology experts say such software, which becomes ever-more effective by learning from its own experience, generally causes fewer privacy concerns because it tends to work without identifying people.<\/p>\n Not everybody is convinced. A reply<\/a> to a parliamentary inquiry into the program says that authorities are considering \u201cmarking\u201d people and objects as part of phase 2 of the project, allowing them to later reconstruct where a person moved inside S\u00fcdkreuz.<\/p>\n To do this, it will be necessary to identify people, experts say, which suggests the use of facial recognition software.<\/p>\n Supporters argue that Berlin needs to provide its law enforcement with access to cutting-edge technology so they can fight back against a growing threat by criminals and terrorists.<\/p>\n \u201cI dont want to withhold certain instruments from our security agencies, just because of the diffuse fear that they could be abused,\u201d said Andrea Lindholz, a member of the German parliament for the conservative Bavarian Christian Social Union and the chair of the Bundestags powerful interior committee.<\/p>\n Andrea Lindholz is a firm backer of the technology | Omer Messinger\/EPA<\/p>\n Lindholz stressed parliament would have to pass respective laws and decide who can be monitored before the facial recognition technology is deployed as part of a law enforcement effort.<\/p>\n \u201cThose who suggest in principle that our state would misuse any bit of information thats available to it suffer from historical amnesia and places todays Germany on the same level as the GDR,\u201d she said. \u201cWe live in a functioning democracy based on the rule of law and with rules that everyone has to respect, which of course includes the state and its authorities.\u201d<\/p>\n Attorney Voigt laughed bitterly when confronted with the argument.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you follow this train of thought, then we wouldnt need the Basic Law [Germanys constitution] at all,\u201d she said. \u201cThen you could always say, lets just demand the people to trust the state.\u201d But, she added, \u201cin particular if you dont suffer from historical amnesia and know the history of Germany, you know that theres no reason to have such basic trust in any state.\u201d<\/p>\n Interim results from the concluded facial recognition trial at S\u00fcdkreuz released by the interior ministry suggest that the experiment has so far performed poorly. Industry officials say that German sensitivities about privacy may be part of the reason why.<\/p>\n Law enforcement has been experimenting with facial recognition for decades, but it is more complicated than it might sound: Faces look different from different angles and in different light. They age. People can put on glasses or hats; men can grow beards or shave them off.<\/p>\n Recent developments in technology, particularly artificial intelligence, have allowed software to better compensate for some of those flaws. But experts warn that, no matter how refined technology becomes, facial recognition software, as we know it today, will only be able to identify people with a certain probability and remain prone to miss a match or identify people incorrectly.<\/p>\n \u201cI consider the first phase as a clear failure\u201d \u2014 Florian Gallwitz, facial recognition expert at the Nuremberg Institute of Technology<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The published results of various recent real-life cases have exposed its limits: When Welsh police trialed facial recognition during the June 2017 Champions League final in Cardiff, it wrongly identified<\/a> 2,297 people \u2014 92 percent of all hits \u2014 as suspicious. Similarly, the software used by local police in Germanys second-largest city Hamburg to analayze video footage of riots surrounding last years G20 meeting ended up identifying<\/a> just three people.<\/p>\n Florian Gallwitz, a facial recognition expert at the Nuremberg Institute of Technology, described interim results<\/a> presented by De Maizi\u00e8re in December 2017 as \u201cnot significantly better\u201d than the results of a trial conducted more than 10 years earlier in the city of Mainz \u2014 despite the fact that technology has become \u201cdramatically\u201d more accurate at recognizing faces within the last decade.<\/p>\n \u201cI consider the first phase as a clear failure,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n One of the reasons, industry officials suggest, could be that they had to deploy their software under far-from-perfect conditions.<\/p>\n Police in Cardiff ahead of the 2017 Champions League final | Ben Stansall\/AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n An employee of a company involved in the trial, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that the interior ministry had made it a precondition that they would only use existing video cameras inside the station, without installing new or additional ones. This, however, hindered the software from being fully effective, the employee said: Cameras were too far away from those they were supposed to identify. Their angles made it difficult to scan faces. And, in particular, many of them were directed against the light.<\/p>\n \u201cWe wont be able to fully exclude a certain margin of error,\u201d conservative lawmaker Lindholz acknowledged. \u201cBut this margin of error has to be as small as possible, so that we can say that, after carefully considering all legal and security aspects, it is justifiable to introduce this instrument within a limited framework.\u201d<\/p>\n She did not specify where the threshold would lie, saying it would have to be decided by parliament.<\/p>\n This article has been updated to clarify quotations attributed to Andrea Lindholz.<\/em><\/p>\n Original Article<\/a><\/p>\n [contf] [contfnew] BERLIN \u2014 Authorities in a major city scan the faces of tens ..<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":92453,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech"],"yoast_head":"\n![](\"https:\/\/www.politico.eu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/berlin_210x140-714x476.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\nSurveillance states<\/h3>\n
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Historical amnesia<\/h3>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.politico.eu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/h_54370222-714x452.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\nMixed results<\/h3>\n
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![](\"https:\/\/www.politico.eu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/GettyImages-691825172-714x476.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\nRead this next: Pedro S\u00e1nchezs 100 days of commotion<\/a><\/em><\/h2>\n
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