Justice & Law Quote by Otto Schily

Schily’s line is a masterclass in bureaucratic candor that barely bothers to disguise itself. He opens with "Incidentally" like he’s mentioning the weather, not state monitoring. That casual throat-clearing is the move: normalize surveillance by treating it as an established, almost mundane fact of modern infrastructure. The audience is gently ushered past the ethical threshold before they’ve had time to argue about it.

Then comes the real payload: "However" flips the sentence from disclosure into invitation. He’s not defending current monitoring; he’s positioning it as insufficient. The phrase "will have to determine" pretends humility and procedural restraint, but it’s also a pressure tactic. By shifting responsibility to "the federal and state governments", Schily spreads the political risk while keeping the policy momentum. It’s a classic public-service two-step: acknowledge oversight, then expand the mandate under the cover of deliberation.

The most revealing tell is the hedged double-negative: "whether video surveillance shouldn't be significantly expanded to a certain degree". This is language engineered to dull alarm. "Significantly" signals ambition; "to a certain degree" reassures skeptics that it’s bounded; the double-negative muddies the direction just enough to make dissent sound like nitpicking. It’s the rhetoric of incrementalism: surveillance framed not as a moral choice but as a technical adjustment.

Contextually, it sits squarely in the post-crisis security politics of Europe: railways as symbolic arteries, fear as public currency. Schily’s intent isn’t just policy; it’s conditioning citizens to accept that visibility equals safety, and that safety naturally demands more visibility.