The 1983 decennial German national census was subject to a surprisingly widespread boycott which popularized, perhaps for the first time in an industrial country, the potential dangers of digital information for surveillance, the loss of privacy, and the redoubling of both through the integration of differing databases. Later that year, partially in reaction to the boycott but largely as a continuation of a long-term juridical debate, the German Supreme Court enjoined a new “right of informational self-determination” defined as a foundational norm within the 1949 Basic Law grounding the republic (16). The administrative developments and debates leading to these events are clearly pertinent for understanding the history of privacy that has been a dominant theme over the last twenty years in Europe and which culminated in the European Union's General Privacy Protection Act of 2016. In their original context, however, as Larry Frohman's book argues, the debates have an even broader significance for understanding the meaning of the welfare state, the politics of surveillance in the West German political context, and a theory of the “politics of personal information” beyond a liberal-individual framework that is of continued pertinence.
Far from being simply a battle of the political left, and notably the Green Party, against the “system,” as it might have appeared in the 1983 protests, the West German debate developed from its inception across party affiliations, in a dialogue of jurists, government officials, and theorists of policing who sought to develop a wide-ranging understanding of how the welfare state could best model its policies and “governing the future” – and conversely the problems such a development might create (367). In three interrelated thematic sections concerning concurrent and occasionally overlapping narratives of population registration, the reform of privacy law, and policing, Frohman develops a deeply insightful “thick description” of archival material depicting this process, from arcane debates on policing through popular media receptions covering the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s. West Germany was perhaps the most sensitive country to this transformation due to its role as heir to a philosophical and administrative tradition that, arising from cameralism and instantiated in the philosophical apparatus of Leibniz and Kant, had always emphasized the interrelation of the development of “sciences of the state” and the shaping of society. Frohman notes the irony that although the 1983 debates focused heavily on rejecting Nazi abuses of planning, the actual parallel that was most pertinent was the contemporary GDR, which was heir to precisely this history, and which entertained equally bold versions of cybernetic information control.
An early agonist in this process was Federal Police Commissioner Horst Herold, who held a bold cybernetic vision of developing policing in relation to the new potentials of databases in the computer era, stating in 1966 that “electronic being determines the consciousness of the police” (230). Following the lead of developments in insurance, housing, and military applications, Herold sought to understand how databases could be used for predicting criminal behavior and discovering threatening milieus in advance. In the context of such projects, jurists and theorists from across the political spectrum began to debate the meaning of what Frohman defines as “personal information” or “information pertinent to identified (or identifiable) individuals and their vital biopolitical governance as a medium for social governance” (4). By 1976, a collection of legal articles on digital privacy would note that this theme was of almost universal importance: “It is hard to imagine any social phenomenon or any legal regulation that did not involve, at least indirectly, the exchange and use of information.” (101) Just as the ecological movement developed from increased industrial process and complexity, so this debate involved a complex dialog of “surveillance capacity” and fears of the “asymmetries” in powers it could create – concerns as active in the liberal business concerns of the FDP or the relation of states to the federal government as it was in the progressive debates of the SPD or the Green party (11). These debates were not only about privacy but also access to information, and ultimately about how state, administrative, and social forces first create a private sphere as much as how it is defended. The separation of private and public spheres that was a constitutive element of the concept of liberalism was, in fact, a central focus of critiques from several sides. Indeed, Frohman argues that this entailed a “paradigm shift” when it was recognized that “[p]rivacy was an informational relationship that was social in nature, that it was political constructed in way that emulated the larger structure of action and inequality in society, and it could, therefore, only be defended – and delimited – on the basis of a comprehensive, critical theory of that society” (80).
Despite or perhaps because of its appearance at the beginning of what we would take as modern data technologies – but which, of course, followed a long development of analog bureaucracies – this early debate was at least as sophisticated as any that followed it, and came to define “the structural conditions of human flourishing [Juliet Cohen],” in a manner which is still relevant (26). Frohman appears to be the ideal historian for this crucial study, as comfortable in archives of police, insurance, regional administration, and computer research as he is in those of the various political parties at all levels involved in the debate and the extra-parliamentary movements that surrounded it, and as at home in the cybernetics debates of the 1970s as in contemporary theories of databases. Frohman's remarkable book will not only be a standard work on the topic of information politics in Germany but will also redefine the meaning of the welfare state as an endeavor to discern wider patterns of social, personal, and political activity through information in order to best address complex social phenomena – which, in doing so, necessarily raised concerns even among its advocates about the specter of surveillance and control, long before these reached public awareness.
