374 JÜRGEN DANYEL AND ANNETTE SCHUHMANN
keep an eye on endangered objects and public trouble spots. The fi lm
hit a nerve at the time because it tapped into the growing unease among
much of the population. With the Orwellian year of 1984 on the horizon,
the extent to which the police, the authorities, and companies collected
data about individual people and groups to use for their own purposes
caught the attention of the general public. This was compounded by fur-
ther technological improvements in the methods of video surveillance
that were used by the police during protests to keep tabs on groups such
as those opposed to nuclear power. The head of the BKA, Horst Herold,
had pointed things in this direction by developing the dragnet investiga-
tion method to search out the RAF (Red Army Faction) terrorists.^82
The mistrust of the growing hunger of the state for more data that was
spreading throughout West Germany manifested itself on the stage of the
census that was scheduled for April 1983.^83 A broad movement to boycott
the census quickly came together within the peace movement and among
environmentalists’ and citizens’ initiatives that had formed in opposition
to large projects such as the construction of the western take-off runway
at the airport in Frankfurt am Main. It was by no means surprising that
these alternative groups and other protesters would be quite sensitive to
the misuse of electronically stored data and new surveillance methods.
Indeed, they were the fi rst people to have direct experience with the new
technologies that were being tried out by the police and the authorities.
The fear was that stored data could be used to identify and control polit-
ically undesirable people and groups. The boycott movement culminated
in hundreds of constitutional complaints.^84 The main point of contention
was the scope of the census and the plan to check the data collected in
the census against the population registers. The fear was that a complete
electronic record of all citizens would have an unimaginable number of
possibilities for combining diff erent data sets, thereby completely oblit-
erating the protection of the private sphere. The growing power of the
computer in the hands of the state was seen as a threat to basic human
rights.^85
With its decision passed on 15 December 1983, the Bundesver-
fassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court) put a stop to the census
because it violated the basic rights of citizens as it was planned. The
protests against the census were the fi rst social movement to directly
respond to the computerization of society. Data protection and the right
of self-determination over personal data brought a new element to po-
litical debate that would prove to be highly contested in the decades to
come. The implications of the success of the protests against the census
in prompting a recodifi cation of citizenship and basic rights in the digi-
tal revolution should not be underestimated. This was a positive experi-