The European approach to AI is frequently marketed as a third way, an alternative to both an AI-powered surveillance capitalism and an AI-powered surveillance state. Landmark instruments such as the AI Act, the General Data Protection Regulation and the Digital Services Act are held up as proof that Europe can foster trustworthy AI while safeguarding democratic values. The word while does heavy lifting here, signaling a compromise between value systems that are supposedly reconciled rather than traded off. Knopp argues that this compromise is not merely a policy stance but a mode of justification, one that selectively absorbs some criticisms while excluding others in order to establish the moral conditions under which data extraction becomes possible at all.

The case at the heart of the study is the Hamburg police’s trial of automated behavioral recognition on Hansaplatz, a square in a predominantly migrant neighborhood undergoing gentrification. The system relies on algorithmic pose estimation: digital video frames are converted into vector graphs, producing what proponents call digital skeletonization, a normalized, decontextualized and depersonalized representation of human bodies. Unlike facial recognition, the software strips away body size, skin color, hair, clothing and body shape, then classifies movements against a predefined set of police-relevant activities such as beating, kicking or defensive posture. A three-month proof-of-concept ran in 2023, and by February 2025 the city parliament had passed the first German law explicitly permitting police to transfer both anonymized and non-anonymized surveillance data to external partners for machine learning.

Getting to that point required enormous sociotechnical investment, what the study, drawing on the pragmatist sociology of Laurent Thévenot, calls form investments. The square itself had to be engineered into something like a laboratory, with AI-ready cameras, an interoperable CCTV system, high-security data infrastructure and an unobstructed sightline across the surveilled space. CCTV operators had to learn to label the system’s outputs, maintain performance logs and interpret the different ways it produces false alarms. Because public spaces rarely yield sufficient footage of atypical behavior, police in Mannheim, where the system was first implemented, even staged show fights in front of cameras, with riot police enacting scripted violence to generate training data. These theatrical performances, the study notes, risk inscribing selective police assumptions about what violence looks like directly into datasets and classification algorithms.

Knopp’s central analytical move is to name these costs data sacrifices. Datafication, he argues, is never a neutral capture of reality but a costly operation of appropriation, exclusion and reductive generalization, one that abstracts traces of events from the complex situations in which they occur. The concept does double duty: it highlights the material and social expenses of formatting the world into data, and it foregrounds the critical agency of social actors who point out what has been disregarded. Where the influential notion of the boundary object emphasized dynamic compromises between local knowledges, the data sacrifice directs attention to the moral work that presents these efforts and exclusions as worthwhile contributions to a higher common good.

Using Critical Discourse Analysis of 57 parliamentary documents spanning from the conservative opposition’s first request in May 2019 to the passage of the new law in February 2025, the study reconstructs five suborders of worth through which the system was justified and attacked: security, individual freedom, social justice, automation and experimentalism. The conservative CDU opened the debate with a catastrophic picture of declining safety, describing citizens who hardly dare to walk alone in the dark and squares that had become crime hotspots plagued by fights and knife attacks. Such narratives perform a dual function, establishing the legal grounds for CCTV while constructing moral urgency around the high discursive value of security.

What made the AI project politically viable, however, was not the old zero-sum logic in which freedom is traded for security. Instead, proponents framed automation itself as the compromise. Conventional CCTV was criticized as inefficient, with one Social Democrat noting that officers have to watch twenty screens all day long, while AI promised to automate attentiveness, cut costs and enable real-time preemption. More remarkably, the technology was sold as a civil-liberties upgrade: because pose estimation supposedly erases personal traits, the innocent bystander remains out of sight, is not stored in any records, and, in the words of one conservative parliamentarian, has nothing to fear. This framing allowed the Green Party, historically rooted in surveillance-skeptic social movements, to reposition itself as a supportive but watchful partner, declaring itself open to the outcomes of the trial while endorsing its potential.

The same logic was extended to social justice. Because the stick figures produced by skeletonization carry no age, gender or ethnicity, proponents claimed the system could not discriminate, positioning it as superior both to human operators and to facial recognition, which had once made the identical promise. Critics from the Left Party saw a discriminatory trap instead, arguing that people with physical disabilities whose movements differ from those classified as normal, or homeless people who sleep rough, would be flagged as atypical, and that discrimination begins the moment someone is captured and unjustly observed, not when police intervene. Rather than finding common ground, these critics were excluded from legitimate debate, dismissed as ideological, ignorant or dishonest by parties that otherwise shared the same civic vocabulary.

When present-day failures could not be justified by the system’s actual capabilities, proponents turned to experimentalism, the solutionist order of worth that frames innovation as an end in itself and an external compulsion. Hamburg was portrayed as lagging behind other federal states; AI was declared to be everywhere, making it quite unrealistic not to exploit it; and German-developed software was celebrated as a matter of competing with American and Chinese surveillance markets. Trial and error became the sole pathway to progress, justifying security risks, costly infrastructure and intrusions into civil rights as temporary sacrifices on the road to an imagined future in which all contradictions would finally be resolved. The study argues that this radical temporalizing of moral paradoxes turns the object of criticism into a moving target and undermines public accountability, since evaluations of present failure are always deflected toward a not-yet-existing entity designed to withstand critique.

The paradoxes culminated in the new Hamburg law, which authorizes the transfer of citizen surveillance data to external developers for machine learning and has since been adopted in other German states. Knopp’s conclusion is pointed: the third way does not simply balance innovation and rights, it equips social control and data extraction with moral underpinnings, internalizing select civic values and critics while excluding others, until the industrialization of surveillance itself becomes a civic value. As local AI trials proliferate across Europe, the study suggests that the decisive battles over what algorithms may see, what data they may consume and who pays the price will be fought not in Brussels policy papers but in precisely such local disputes, where the sacrifices are made concrete and the justifications, for those willing to look, become visible.

Subject of Research: Parliamentary justification and critique of data extraction in an AI-based CCTV surveillance trial in Hamburg, Germany

Article Title: Data sacrifices and the ‘third way’ toward AI: justification and critique in local conflicts over automated surveillance

Article References: Knopp, P. (2026). Data sacrifices and the ‘third way’ toward AI: justification and critique in local conflicts over automated surveillance. AI & SOCIETY. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03075-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00146-026-03075-w

Keywords: artificial intelligence, surveillance, datafication, CCTV, police, Hamburg, third way, critical data studies, pose estimation, machine learning, parliamentary discourse, civil liberties

Professor Renate Schnabel of Hamburg will serve as congress president for the main Herztage program, which is published under the banner Kardiologie Aktuell. Schnabel is a well-known figure in cardiovascular epidemiology and heart-failure research, and her appointment signals a program expected to bridge population-level cardiovascular science with clinical practice. The rhythm-focused Deutsche Rhythmus Tage will be led by Priv.-Doz. Anja Schade of Bad Neustadt, while Professor Tanja Katharina Rudolph of Bad Oeynhausen will preside over AGIK Live, the interventional component of the meeting.

Basic science receives dedicated organizational attention at the congress. Professor Harald Langer of Mannheim and Professor Rabea Hinkel of Göttingen will organize the Basic Science Meeting, a strand designed to connect laboratory-level cardiovascular research with translational and clinical audiences. In addition, the Akademieforen, a series of academy forums aimed at continuing medical education, will be coordinated by Professor Christiane Tiefenbacher of Wesel and Professor Albrecht Elsässer of Oldenburg. This layered structure reflects the congress’s dual role as a scientific meeting and a professional training platform for German-speaking cardiology.

The scientific program is supported by a searchable online abstract database, accessible through the congress website at herzmedizin.de. According to the announcement, the database allows physicians and allied professionals to search documents by keyword, giving attendees a tool to navigate the full scientific program before arriving in Hamburg. Abstract-driven sessions remain a core mechanism through which new clinical trial results, registry analyses, and mechanistic studies enter the public record at European cardiology meetings.

The venue itself carries weight in the European cardiology calendar. The Congress Center Hamburg is a regular host for large medical congresses, and a late-September slot positions the Herztage after the summer lull in the conference season and ahead of the autumn wave of major international meetings. For German cardiovascular medicine, the Herztage function as the principal national forum where late-breaking science, guideline updates, and health-policy debates converge under one roof.

The announcement appeared in Clinical Research in Cardiology, the official journal of the German Cardiac Society, published by Springer Nature. The journal serves as a standing venue for society communications, original research, and reviews in cardiovascular medicine, and its publication of the congress notice gives the meeting details a citable, version-of-record home. The published record notes that Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations, a standard publisher’s note for internationally distributed academic content.

For clinicians planning continuing education, the division of the congress into distinct strands matters practically. The main Herztage program under Schnabel typically spans the breadth of cardiovascular medicine, while the Deutsche Rhythmus Tage under Schade concentrates on arrhythmia management, including device therapy and electrophysiology. AGIK Live, under Rudolph, is associated with the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Interventionelle Kardiologie, the interventional cardiology working group of the German Cardiac Society, and traditionally features live case transmissions from catheterization laboratories, a format that lets attendees observe real-time procedural decision-making.

The basic science meeting organized by Langer and Hinkel underscores a broader trend in European cardiology congresses: the deliberate integration of molecular and preclinical research into clinically oriented programs. Hinkel’s work in cardiovascular gene therapy and regenerative approaches, and Langer’s background in thrombosis and platelet biology, illustrate the translational orientation that the organizers bring to this strand. By pairing basic scientists with clinical leadership across the congress, the German Cardiac Society positions the Herztage as a venue where bench-to-bedside conversations are structurally embedded rather than incidental.

The Akademieforen, coordinated by Tiefenbacher and Elsässer, extend the congress’s educational reach. These forums are designed as interactive academy sessions rather than passive lecture formats, and they typically address case-based learning, guideline application, and emerging diagnostic and therapeutic techniques. Their inclusion alongside the scientific and interventional strands reflects the society’s effort to serve trainees, established clinicians, and allied professionals within a single meeting architecture.

Registration and program details are distributed through the German Cardiac Society’s congress platform, and the abstract database linked in the announcement is expected to grow as submission cycles close. With the congress presidents named and the Hamburg dates fixed, the organizational skeleton of DGK Herztage 2026 is now public, giving researchers, clinicians, and industry participants the framework they need to plan submissions, sessions, and attendance for what remains the flagship annual meeting of German cardiovascular medicine.

Subject of Research: The DGK Herztage 2026 cardiology congress announcement

Article Title: DGK Herztage 2026

Article References: DGK Herztage 2026. (2026). Clinical Research in Cardiology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00392-026-03036-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00392-026-03036-9

Keywords: cardiology, DGK Herztage 2026, German Cardiac Society, Hamburg, clinical research, arrhythmia, interventional cardiology, basic science, medical congress, Clinical Research in Cardiology, continuing medical education, cardiovascular medicine

The scale of the dataset is what gives the study its power. Whole genome sequencing was performed on nearly every culture-confirmed tuberculosis case in Hamburg across 25 years, allowing the researchers to compare the full genetic blueprints of bacterial strains rather than relying on older, lower-resolution fingerprinting methods. The team analyzed population structure and transmission dynamics in relation to patients’ self-reported geographical origins, combining genomic data with demographic and epidemiological information gathered through mandatory public health surveillance under Germany’s infectious diseases law. This integration of pathogen genetics with host demographics is precisely what earlier molecular epidemiological studies lacked, and it allowed the investigators to distinguish between bacteria that had merely been imported with their hosts and bacteria that were genuinely transmitting from person to person within the city.

The first major finding concerns lineage diversity. The Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex comprises several major lineages with distinct geographic footprints: Lineage 2 and Lineage 4 are highly transmissible, globally distributed generalists, while Lineages 1, 3 and 5 through 9 are geographically restricted specialists adapted to particular regions. In Hamburg, the researchers detected strains from lineages L1 through L6 as well as Mycobacterium bovis, the cattle-adapted member of the complex. Lineage 4 dominated throughout, accounting for 74.6 percent of all strains, or 2,337 isolates. But the composition of the bacterial population shifted markedly over time. In the first five years of the study, L4 strains made up 83.5 percent of isolates; in the final five years, that share had fallen to 63.0 percent. Over the same period, strains of Lineage 3, a specialist lineage classically associated with the Horn of Africa and South Asia, rose from 4.8 percent to 18.1 percent of the population.

That shift might seem to suggest that newly arrived lineages were outcompeting established ones, or that changing bacterial properties were driving the epidemiology. The genomic evidence says otherwise. When the researchers examined transmission clusters, groups of patients infected with nearly identical strains that indicate recent person-to-person spread, they found that the changing lineage distribution correlated with the increasing number of foreign-born patients rather than with enhanced transmission of any particular lineage. In other words, the diversification of Hamburg’s tuberculosis population was a demographic phenomenon, not a microbiological one. New strains arrived with new residents, but they did not, for the most part, go on to spread widely within the local population.

The cluster analysis drives this point home. Of the 269 transmission clusters identified across the 25-year period, 81 percent, or 218, were composed of Lineage 4 strains. This dominance was far out of proportion even to L4’s overall prevalence, indicating that sustained local transmission in Hamburg remained overwhelmingly the province of long-established bacterial lineages. Strains of specialist lineages such as L3, despite becoming numerically more common as imports increased, contributed relatively little to ongoing chains of transmission. The bacteria that thrive in Hamburg are, in an evolutionary sense, the bacteria that were already there.

Delving deeper into Lineage 4 revealed another layer of complexity: heterogeneity in transmission potential among its sublineages. Not all L4 strains are equal. The researchers found that sublineages L4.1.2.1, L4.8 and L4.3 were each detected in patients born in more than 15 different world regions, with more than 57 percent of those cases occurring in people from Europe. This pattern supports what evolutionary biologists call the generalist-specialist hypothesis at a finer resolution than ever before. Certain sublineages behave as globally successful generalists, capable of infecting and transmitting among host populations of vastly different genetic backgrounds and geographic origins, while others remain confined to specific regions. The importance of this sublineage-level resolution is a methodological lesson for the field: analyses that stop at the major-lineage level would miss the heterogeneity in transmissibility that the Hamburg data expose.

The technical machinery behind these conclusions deserves attention. Whole genome sequencing of more than 3,000 isolates allowed the team to apply a five-allele distance threshold, a conservative criterion under which strains sharing nearly identical core genomes are considered part of the same recent transmission chain. Core genome multilocus sequence typing and single nucleotide polymorphism analyses provided complementary views of population structure, and maximum likelihood phylogenetic methods placed the Hamburg strains within the global diversity of the tuberculosis complex. By combining these genomic tools with the patients’ self-reported regions and countries of birth, grouped according to United Nations statistical divisions, the researchers could ask, for any given cluster, whether it represented a single introduction with limited onward spread or sustained transmission across the community.

The public health implications are significant. In low-incidence settings, the central strategic question is whether each tuberculosis case is an isolated importation or part of an active local transmission network, because the two scenarios demand different responses. Imported cases call for ensuring that arriving populations have access to screening and care, while clustered cases call for contact investigation and outbreak response. The Hamburg study shows that genomic surveillance can make this distinction reliably at scale, and that the answer may not follow intuition. A rising share of foreign-born cases and a diversifying bacterial population did not translate into altered transmission dynamics; the city’s transmission landscape remained anchored in its established L4 sublineages. Policymakers worried that migration inherently fuels tuberculosis spread can point to this evidence that pathogen characteristics and local adaptation matter as much as host demographics.

The study also underscores the interplay between pathogen evolution and human population structure. Successful transmission, the authors conclude, is mediated by locally adapted sublineages, and the predominance of L4.1.2.1 and L4.8 among patients from a wide range of countries demonstrates that these sublineages have achieved a breadth of host adaptation that specialist lineages lack. Migration substantially increased the genetic diversity of the bacterial population in Hamburg but did not fundamentally alter how tuberculosis transmits there. As genomic sequencing becomes cheaper and more routine, the Hamburg experience offers a template for other low-incidence cities: maintain long-term, systematic sequencing integrated with demographic data, analyze at sublineage resolution, and interpret lineage shifts in light of migration patterns before attributing them to changes in bacterial fitness. Twenty-five years of genomes have turned a single German city into a natural laboratory for understanding how one of the world’s deadliest pathogens responds to the movement of its human hosts, and the answer, reassuringly, is that established local strains still hold the ground.

Subject of Research: Molecular epidemiology of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex transmission and lineage diversity in relation to migration in Hamburg, Germany, over 25 years

Article Title: Migration and tuberculosis transmission in Hamburg, Germany: insights from 25 years of molecular epidemiology

Article References: Ullrich, N., Diel, R., Meywald-Walter, K., Schwarzbach, C., Gröschel, M. I., Kuhns, M., Friesen, I., Niemann, S., & Dreyer, V. (2026). Migration and tuberculosis transmission in Hamburg, Germany: insights from 25 years of molecular epidemiology. Genome Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13073-026-01750-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13073-026-01750-7

Keywords: tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex, whole genome sequencing, molecular epidemiology, migration, lineage 4, transmission clusters, generalist-specialist hypothesis, genomic surveillance, Hamburg, low-incidence settings, sublineages