[rohrpost] Techno-Policing & Civic Control - 16 Oct - Berlin

[Tatiana Bazzichelli]

Dear Rohrpost List,

I would like to announce our next event in Berlin at nGbK:
Techno-Policing & Civic Control: Talk & Q&A
Thursday, October 16, 2025
7:00pm – 9:00pm

With Sonja Peteranderl (Investigative Journalist, Founder of 
BuzzingCities Lab, DE) and Matthias Monroy (Journalist, Activist, Expert 
on Civil Rights, Policing, and Security Technologies, DE).

Free entrance with registration. Registration is open to all, with 
participation limited to 70 people.
Register: https://www.disruptionlab.org/event/techno-policing

This meetup follows the programme of the Disruption Network Lab’s 
conference TECHNOVIOLENCE: Confronting Systemic Injustice (19–21 
September 2025, https://www.disruptionlab.org/technoviolence). It will 
bring investigative journalist Sonja Peteranderl and journalist and 
activist Matthias Monroy into dialogue, with the former providing 
insight into ongoing predictive policing experiments and the latter 
tracing the history of facial recognition systems in Germany. How do 
these systems function, or fail, and how do they reinforce and 
exacerbate discrimination in Germany? The meetup will explore this 
phenomenon and discuss potential countermeasures with activists, 
artists, and the wider civil society.

The German police are increasingly focusing on digital possibilities for 
‘predicting’ and ‘preventing’ crimes and other incidents that may occur 
in the future. They have significantly increased their operational use 
of 'predictive' data analysis and algorithms in recent years, including 
geographic crime 'prediction', individual profiling, and data analysis 
to predict the risk of individuals committing violent acts in future. In 
this digital ecosystem, the police are also becoming increasingly 
dependent on commercial players such as the controversial US tech firm 
Palantir. Its “Gotham” software sifts through large volumes of data, 
identifying patterns and drawing connections to generate new grounds for 
suspicion.

Police facial recognition systems have existed in Germany since 2008. 
The number of queries and affected individuals increases every year; 
currently, the INPOL database stores the faces of 5.5 million people. 
The system is now being converted to artificial intelligence. According 
to the president of the Federal Criminal Police Office, the technology 
can be largely automated, making an entire department redundant. Only 
the EU AI Act still requires a final human review of matches. 
Retrospective facial analyses are increasingly used at the European 
level as well, with Germany pushing the networking of such systems under 
the Prüm framework. At the same time, the U.S. government is demanding 
access to these biometric databases. A legal amendment would also allow 
German police to conduct facial comparisons online. After pilot 
projects, real-time recognition is now being introduced in public 
spaces: Saxony has implemented a system that is also used in mobile 
units along the border with Poland. In Hesse, a KI-based facial 
recognition is being rolled out for the first time to issue alerts in 
the search for “Gefährder” or missing children.

Speakers

Sonja Peteranderl is an investigative journalist and the founder of 
BuzzingCities Lab – a think tank focusing on violence, crime and the 
impact of technology – and The School of Conflict & Peace. She covers 
organized crime, violence, relationship & digital violence, 
security/policing and tech trends, from predictive policing to criminal 
innovation for SWR Vollbild, SPIEGEL, Zeit or AlgorithmWatch. She 
teaches at the Hamburg Media School and is a mediator (International 
Peace Mediation).

Matthias Monroy is a journalist, activist, and expert on civil rights, 
policing, and security technologies in Europe. He works as editor for 
the civil rights journal Bürgerrechte & Polizei/CILIP and for nd.DerTag. 
His data-driven research and critical reporting published also in 
left-wing media relates to police practices, digital surveillance and 
European security policy.

More info:
https://www.disruptionlab.org/event/techno-policing

-- 
Tatiana Bazzichelli // Artistic Director
Disruption Network Lab
https://www.disruptionlab.org/
E-mail for personal messages: tbazz(at)disruptionlab.org
Twitter: @disruptberlin // @t_bazz
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