The only realistic way to counter this is to say no to surveillance technology from the start.

Of course, there should be checks, controls, limitations placed upon those institutions, and transparency in their workings. But the police is here to protect and serve the community, at least it should be, not to oppress it. I've noticed that this is a difference in the way the police is often seen in Europe vs. in the UK for instance.

The key question when the phrase "protect and serve the community" comes up is "which community?" and the answer is: it primarily serves the interest of the rich and powerful. If you are poor, not in the majority ethnic or in any other way not "mainstream", you have shit times ahead of you. No matter the country, the only difference between a cop in the US and a cop in the UK is better training and less reliance on guns.

Homeless, being a person of color, being LGBT, protesting the government (especially from the left wing) - all common risk factors for adverse interactions with police. If you never have had a negative interaction with police, ask yourself why and prepare for an answer you likely would not have liked to hear.

Ah, so that’s why American cops routinely murder random people and go unpunished - it’s just the lack of training!

(The reality is that there’s a fundamental difference in that in Europe police is just another government branch that’s helping people, like firefighters and doctors; normal people don’t need to fear them and avoid any unnecessary interactions, which seems to be the case in the US.)

I'm German. Our cops are infamous for racial profiling and can, at least according to several independent investigations, even get away with murdering people in their jail cells (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oury_Jalloh).

Better training doesn't prevent racial profiling and this kind of problems.

> But, when pressed, no one can point to cases where this actually helped.

This seems like an early dismissal. It is obvious how facial recognition can help locate suspects for some crime more easily than a police officer hoping to randomly find the suspect while driving around.

> The only realistic way to counter this

Counter what exactly? This just feels like FUD.

Checks and balances on police have been tried and the result wasn't even remotely what politicians promised. Judicial oversight, for example, isn't actually working. Police and judges go through the motions, but judges routinely get so many requests for warrants that they sign almost anything in practice because they have too little time to check each one thoroughly. That's how we get police searching the homes of security researchers who dared to report gaping security holes just because they pissed off whoever had the security issues in the first place. It's a pattern that repeated quite a few times. I don't have the time now to dig up a list of cases that followed this pattern and where, in the end, the researchers walked away scot free, but often with considerable financial damages.

Another example: police has pretty extensive databases with private details of individuals. Officers are only allowed to access records in them when their work assignment warrants it. The software keeps audit logs on database accesses so that misuse can be discovered and held in check. But it turned out that nobody ever checks these logs. This came to light initially when police officers started to leak contact details of lawyers to far-right extremists to have them threatened. Under political pressure, the logs were finally reviewed and they found wide spread abuse of the available databases. The result: two years later, the same lawyers and some politicians receive another set of death threats, even after moving to new addresses they kept painstakingly secret. Again, the trace leads back to police officers leaking personal information.

Politicians are also gradually expanding existing police powers in somewhat bad faith. First, it's just for an extremely narrow set of sufficiently horrible crimes like terrorism or sexual abuse of children. And they swear by all that's holy that this will be all that it's ever going to be used for. Then, maybe two or three years later, when public interest is drawn to other issues, the same parties start to steadily and quietly amend this list time and again. [Curiously, many such law changes get discussed and voted on during big football tournaments (think European Championship or World Championship) when they don't draw much attention. But I can't tell whether that's merely the result of election cycles aligning with these tournaments by chance or a deliberate tactic.]

To sum it up: if there is a way to put working checks on police powers, politicians haven't found them or don't establish them in a way that is effective. In light of these patterns, the only realistic stance that remains is to either give police full unchecked access to certain tools or none at all. I wish I could subscribe to your view on this matter, and to be fair, many years ago I would have agreed. But I have been disillusioned since.

Jesus hell no. Law enforcement already has too many permissions, and you can bet that there are more than enough people who would like the police to put iris scanners, gait monitors and other crap on each train station and public square. Minority Report and Little Brother should be warning enough, I feel no desire to see science fiction becoming reality.

> but IMHO this means we should work on it and see if it can become useful rather than killing it off completely so early by having a blanket ban.

We need a blanket ban because when you grant the government a single digit of your hand, tomorrow it has your whole arm in a vice. "War on drugs", "war on prostitution", "protect our children from kidnapping!!!" - the list of stuff that people will bring up once the technology is in place is endless, and there are enough voters convinceable with fear mongering that the authoritarians will get what they want.

> In any case, individual member states can draw their own laws on this.

Blanket bans and mandatory requirements cannot be overridden.

> On a side note, the wording in English might give the impression that the German government decides EU law...

Let's be real: Germany, France, Italy and Spain are the dominant powers in the European Union. As long as only the Commission has the right to initiate the passing of laws, most initiatives will come out of these "big four" countries, and there will not be any initiatives where it isn't clear from the beginning that they have a high likelihood of passing.

While private companies are using this data in ways that cause harm quite indirectly (influence, consumerism - societal evils to be sure, but no immediate threat to your life), police and the SS are most likely to cause very active harm with such technologies.

Crime numbers? Completely unaffected. I have no illusion that it is a mechanism to empower executive forces of course, but these invasive mechanism have to justify their existence. They have not done that to any degree at all.

First, the text „lehnen wir ab“ can be read as “we won't accept”, in the sense that these legislators are against it. But legislators all over the world say stuff like that all the time, and in the end they often get overruled or outvoted anyway.

Second, I think in a (negative) sense the German government does decide EU law — just like any other national government within the EU does: IIRC, in at least one of the (confusingly) many entities that decide on EU-wide legislation (Council? Commission? Ah, fuck knows...), all the national governments are represented with one vote each, and unanimity is required, i.e. they each have a veto.