Federal Minister of the Interior Alexander Dobrindt

The BigBrotherAward 2025 in the category Authorities and Administration goes to

the Minister of the Interior Alexander Dobrindt

for his so-called Security Package.

The challenges we are currently facing in the world and in this country could hardly be any bigger. The future of the planet and the international order are uncertain. The social market economy has started to falter. More than enough reasons for people to feel insecure. And what does the Federal Minister of the Interior do? He conjures up a bogeyman; tries to create the impression of creating security by fighting crime. His party, the Christian Social Union (CSU, the Bavarian branch of the conservative CDU) is a master at this game of populism. How to create the illusion of safety, how to demonstrate the illusion of strength? Through control and surveillance. Of all of us.

With this, the conservative party has fallen for the promises of salvation from the most authoritarian ideologues of Silicon Valley.

What does Dobrindt’s security package entail? The toxic ingredients are: face-searching engines and the replacement of police work by the most creepy software on the planet: “Gotham” by Palantir, also known as “Federal VeRA”. A dystopia turned into reality.

The technical capabilities offered by face-searching engines are the stuff of every stalker’s wet dreams. Upload a snapshot of a person taken covertly on the street, perform automatic biometric matching within seconds, and you can find all online hits containing that face, be it a party picture from years ago on social media, or the photograph of a public protest. Biometric face-search engines allow everyone to identify strangers from afar. Very convenient for stalking women and children.

Face-searching engines are not only extremely dangerous, they are also illegal. They create biometric measurements from all images available on the Internet, and thus violate Article 9 of the General Data Protection Regulation, which protects our most sensitive data. The biometric scans are performed not only on suspects or wanted criminals, but on all of us. The two largest providers are Clearview AI and PimEyes. Clearview AI has already been penalised multiple times by European data protection agencies.¹ PimEyes is currently under investigation for a fine by the commissioner for data protection and freedom of information of the state of Baden-Württemberg.²

Both companies are on the run. PimEyes relocated from Poland first to Seychelles and from there to Georgia to evade the authorities. The enforcement of fines against Clearview AI, headquartered in New York, has also been unsuccessful so far. Alexander Dobrindt now plans to cooperate with these fugitive law-breakers. The security package envisions permissions for the authorities to make use of illegal face-search engines. These tools shall be used not only to look for suspects, but also for witnesses. It is hard to imagine a greater paradox in a state under the rule of law. Dobrindt legitimises these illegal spying machines.

Paragraph 15a of the law on political asylum has created one such permission for the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees: for identifying applicants. As often, the tools of repression are introduced in small steps: Against migrants at first, then for fighting serious crime. The next step is often the deployment against larger groups of the population. Soon these methods could be used for solving or preventing minor offences, such as violations of narcotics laws, tax evasion or false statements towards welfare agencies.

The second part of the security package brings Germany one step closer to the dystopia of total surveillance. The “Gotham” software by Palantir, which the Federal Criminal Police Office is supposed to use under the moniker “Bundes-VeRA” (“Federal VeRA”) is a mixture of Minority Report and the Chinese social scoring system. As you remember, in Minority Report it was possible to predict murders.

With this data analysis software marketed under the “AI” label, crimes shall be solved and even predicted. Calculations are made to determine who would “probably” commit a certain crime.

Everything that is stored in the databases of the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA), Dobrindt wants to feed into these ostensibly intelligent systems: Data from compound files, criminal investigations, biometric data, interviews with suspects and witnesses, information from databases on terrorism and right-wing extremism.³ Ominous “patterns” are supposed to be found in these records. Scientific evidence for the efficacy of such analyses is absent. In the 2010s, for example, some federal states introduced software to predict burglaries – and quickly got rid of it again, because it yielded no measurable success. It only ate up large license fees.⁴

So what could possibly go wrong?

You live in the wrong neighbourhood, or have the wrong contacts. For example, because you are a social worker and routinely have to deal with criminals, you may quickly come under the spotlight. Statistical calculations of probabilities of who might commit a crime are pure discrimination machines. The weakest members of society will be subjected to the most inspections: if you are poor, or your skin is dark, if your first name doesn’t sound German, it is much more likely that you will be suspected. Police databases contain lots of parameters with the potential for discrimination, such as the “phenotype”, or the “ethnicity” of a person.

We all can be subjected to suspicion. And the true perpetrator? Might easily shift out of focus.

France and the Netherlands introduced systems like that, which were supposed to indicate which persons were most likely to commit social fraud. It turned out that the weakest were most likely to be wrongly suspected: single parents, people with physical disabilities or with a migration history.⁵

The list of cases in which the Federal Criminal Police Office is to be allowed such analyses is long. It not only encompasses murder, manslaughter or serious terrorist attacks, but also includes betting fraud, receiving stolen goods and certain narcotics offences.

When in 2023 the Federal Constitutional Court found similar provisions in the state law of Hesse to be unconstitutional, this was precisely one of the core issues: the regulations contained unclear phrasing and could be applied to criminal offences below the constitutionally required threshold. Further, the court ruled that data of witnesses must not be used under any circumstances. But the draft laws from the Ministry of the Interior do not adhere to these requirements. What is especially juicy: According to the draft the usage shall also be permitted for preventing crimes in advance.⁶

Also according to the draft legislation, in order to perform these analyses, the Federal Criminal Police Office shall cooperate with “third parties, even outside the European Union”. Alexander Dobrindt does not hide the fact that he wishes to introduce software from Palantir. Peter Thiel and Alexander Karp named their enterprise after the crystal balls from “The Lord of the Rings”. Whoever owns such a “seeing stone” in Tolkien’s trilogy can communicate across vast distances and see events in far places, and thus secure their own power – an IT company with delusions of omnipotence.

You might think that the regency of the unpredictable Donald Trump would be an obvious motivation to strengthen the sovereignty of our security and police forces, to work with European IT systems, thereby ensuring our ability to act even in cases of geopolitical upheavals. But Dobrindt wants to make the Federal Criminal Police Office dependent on the good grace of these two oligarchs. The company’s founder Peter Thiel is considered to be part of extreme right-wing forces in the USA.⁷ He is a Trump fan and openly pursues anti-democratic goals. Peter Thiel confesses publicly that in his view “freedom and democracy are incompatible”.⁸ This software has been created for an authoritarian state.

By choosing Palantir software we will be giving these people partial control over the work of the German police. And besides that, we will pay them millions of tax euros.⁹ This could be the next big spending disaster for the state budget caused by the CSU.

Dobrindt uses techno-solutionism, the illusory solution of social problems with technology, in place of real competence and leadership.

In that sense: congratulations, Alexander Dobrindt, on the BigBrotherAward 2025.