The Opaque State: Surveillance and Deportation in the Bundesrepublik

In his study of deportation in contemporary Germany, Militiadis Oulios notes that one of the "un-words of the year" in 2002 was "Ausreisezentrum" (19). The euphemistic term refers to detention facilities where asylum seekers without passports are held until their identities are determined and their deportations completed. Because it is German policy not to deport anyone without a passport, the absence of an identity document leaves them in legal limbo, often for long periods of time. In regular deportation prison (Abschiebehaft), detainees are charged for their days of residence at the rate of a moderately priced hotel, have their biometric data recorded for identification, and are put on an airplane, either alone or accompanied, and sometimes wearing a so-called "bodycuff" restraining their limbs beneath their clothes. The biometric data is shared through Europe-wide databases to prevent reentry into the Schengen area, leaving what scholars call "data doubles" on government servers. Frozen in physical categories, this digital reduction of the person may inadvertently draw further attention to itself in the context of probabilistic models of "actuarial justice" and discriminatory practices of racial profiling.1 Since 1993, select German airports also have facilities technically outside of sovereign territory where refugees can be held, and often deported, after expedited trials (298). Oulios refers to all of these sites as the "black boxes of deportation." He presents them as the built refutation of the official German mythology as a "transparent state" expressed through the glass domes and curtain walls of its government buildings with their annual "Open Door Days."2 Through unprecedented access to the archives of German intelligence agencies, Foschepoth provides the most comprehensive portrait to date of how US and West German intelligence agencies monitored personal communication in the territory of the Federal Republic. He documents how US authorities "seized, opened and for the most part, destroyed" millions of letters and packages sent from both East and West Germany from 1949 until the early 1970s and copied all telexes to be sent to the NSA for evaluation (15). The West German authorities were enthusiastic partners. With their help, close to twenty million items of post originating in East Germany were confiscated and destroyed at the high point of 1960 (116). Foschepoth introduces the Reißwolf, literally "shred wolf," housed in a prison in Lüneber