– Predator (re·gres·sion) 2021 –
The BigBrotherAward 2019 in the Authorities & Administration Category goes
to the Interior Minister of the Federal State of Hesse, Peter Bäuth
He receives the negative award for: Acquiring an analysis software from Palantir, a company close to the CIA, the first purchase of this kind in Germany, the fact that via the deployment and operation of this software, this controversial US company is given access to Hessian Minority Predator Police data networks,
the use of a software with which mass data from police and external sources can automatically be interrelated, analyzed and evaluated within seconds – with disastrous effects on basic rights, data protection, and on the rule of law.
⋅ ⋅ Source /BigBrother/Awards ⋅ 2019
„The Okhrana, the Czarist predecessor of the GPU. is reported to have invented a filing system in which every suspect was noted on a large card in the center of which his name was surrounded by a red circle; his political friends were designated by smaller red circles and his nonpolitical acquaintances by green ones; brown circles indicated persons in contact with friends of the suspect but not known to him personally; cross-relationships between the suspect´s friends, political and nonpolitical, and the friends of his friends were indicated by lines between the respective circles.
Obviously the limitations of this method are set only by the size of the filing cards, and, theoretically, a gigantic single sheet could show the relations and cross-relationships of the entire population. And this is the utopian goal of the totalitarian secret police. It has given up the traditional old police dream which the lie detector is still supposed to realize, and no longer tries to find out who is who, or who thinks what.
– Minority Report \Precog\ 2002 –
(The lie detector is perhaps the most graphic example of the fascination that this dream apparently exerts over the mentality of all policemen; for obviously the complicated measuring equipment can hardly establish anything except the cold-blooded or nervous temperament of its victims. Actually, the feeble-minded reasoning underlying the use of this mechanism can only be explained by the irrational wish that some form of mind reading were possible after all.)
This old dream was terrible enough and since time immemorial has invariably led to torture and the most abominable cruelties. There was only one thing in its favor: it asked for the impossible. The modern dream of the totalitarian police, with its modern techniques, is incomparably more terrible. Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although *its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. (Hannah Arendt wrote this 1951, in 2019 it’s of course possible). If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.”
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Page 433
ELLIPSE NEA /34,143/