Horst Herold and Computerized Policing
Abstract
Horst Herold (1923–2018), president of West Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) from 1971 to 1981, turned the police into one of the country’s largest computer users. Under him the BKA built the nationwide information system INPOL and developed Rasterfahndung, dragnet searches that sifted public records for the profile of a suspect, in the hunt for the Red Army Faction. The press called him “Kommissar Computer.” The same methods made the computer a symbol of the surveillance state, and the backlash fed the protests against the 1983 census and the Constitutional Court’s ruling that created the right to informational self-determination.
The Prosecutor from Nuremberg
Herold was born in Sonneberg, Thuringia, on 21 October 1923. He became a court assessor in 1952 and a public prosecutor in Nuremberg, and moved into the police: head of the Nuremberg criminal police from 1964 and police president from 1967. On 1 September 1971 he took over the Bundeskriminalamt in Wiesbaden.
The BKA Goes Digital
The BKA had been founded by a law of 15 March 1951 under the federal interior ministry. Through the 1950s and 1960s it was mainly a forensic research institute that collected weapons, forged money and fingerprints and issued a monthly wanted list. In 1965 Der Spiegel enthused about the “crime computers” helping American police, and in 1966 a BKA working group, at first one mathematician and one detective, began to study data processing; it grew, was dissolved in 1971, and early in 1972 the BKA set up a data-processing department, with 56 staff by that spring and a computing centre under construction.
From 13 to 17 March 1972 the BKA’s annual conference was devoted to data processing; Herold, ill, could not attend, and his deputy Werner Heinl opened it with the words “The police have never done anything other than process data.” Speakers learned that the new centre would run two Siemens 4004 systems with disks for almost a gigabyte, at an annual rent of 4.2 million marks. The states described their plans, the domestic intelligence service presented its NADIS system, and an FBI official the American National Crime Information Center of 1967. Smaller forces were already experimenting: the Bremen criminal police used a Nixdorf 820 to produce printouts for patrol officers, and in 1971 located 131 suspects that way, 25 of whom were arrested.
On 28 January 1972 the conference of interior ministers had decided to create INPOL, a common information system of the federal and state police with the BKA as its hub. By 1977 some 800 terminals were connected over about 60,000 kilometres of lines, handling around 1.5 million transactions a day, with answers to urgent queries in four to six seconds. It held wanted persons and objects, criminal records, descriptions and fingerprints, and remained in service, increasingly through emulation, until INPOL-neu replaced it in 2003.
The Dragnet
In May 1972 the Red Army Faction began a new series of bombings, and the BKA’s data became a weapon in the hunt. Herold’s most famous innovation was the Rasterfahndung, a search by elimination: instead of looking for a suspect, the police took a large set of records and removed everyone who could be accounted for. In 1979 investigators in Frankfurt took the 18,000 customers who paid their electricity bills in cash, a habit of people living under false names, and deleted everyone registered as a legal resident, vehicle owner or otherwise verified. Two names remained; one of them led to the arrest of the RAF member Rolf Heißler.
Millions of names went onto the BKA’s disks and tapes. In 1979 Der Spiegel ran a series titled “Das Stahlnetz stülpt sich über uns” (“The steel net closes over us”), and the computer, until then a symbol of progress, became one of surveillance. After a heart attack in September 1980 Herold retired early, at the end of March 1981. For security reasons he spent his retirement in a Federal Border Guard barracks in Rosenheim and called himself “the last prisoner of the RAF.” He died in Nuremberg on 14 December 2018.
The Census Revolt
The distrust Herold’s methods had created exploded over the census planned for 27 April 1983. The census law had passed in March 1982 with the advice of the federal data protection commissioner, but from December 1982 a protest movement grew out of a play about personnel information systems staged at Hamburg’s art academy, boycott initiatives multiplied, and constitutional complaints argued that census data could be matched to individuals and used to correct the population registers. On 13 April 1983, two weeks before the count, the Federal Constitutional Court stopped it by injunction. Its judgment of 15 December 1983 declared the law unconstitutional and established a fundamental right to informational self-determination, the citizen’s right to decide on the disclosure and use of personal data, a concept developed by the legal scholars Wilhelm Steinmüller and Spiros Simitis (see Germany’s Computing Pioneers and The Privacy War).
The census finally took place on 25 May 1987 under a new law. Some 600,000 enumerators distributed the forms, which IBM 1288 optical readers processed in the statistical offices; deliberately spoiled forms were too few to matter. The count, costing almost a billion marks, found 61.083 million inhabitants, a million fewer dwellings and a million more people in work than estimated. Germany did not attempt another full census; the 2011 count covered only a ten-per-cent sample. The memory of the 1939 census, processed on DEHOMAG machines, ran through the debate (see DEHOMAG: IBM’s German Subsidiary).