Facial-recognition software continues to create heated controversy, as illustrated by a year-long pilot run at the Berlin-Südkreuz train station. The test run at one of Berlin’s main arteries was a catalyst for media attention, spurring heated discourse on the efficiency and legitimacy of surveillance technology. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis and (post-)panoptic theory, this paper investigates how the relationship between the public and the state is represented, how automated surveillance technology is linguistically framed and which problematisations were associated with the technology deployed during the 2017 pilot.