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German Police Accused of Carrying Out Some Pretty Stupid Raids (bleepingcomputer.com)
Catalin Cimpanu, writing for BleepingComputer: Two privacy-focused organizations have this week accused German police of carrying out raids at their offices and members' private homes on some pretty shoddy reasoning that makes no sense and hints at the police's abuse of power. The first of these organizations is Zwiebelfreunde, a non-profit group based in Dresden that runs Tor relay servers and supports privacy and anonymity projects by providing legal and financial help. One of the ways it helps these projects includes collecting donations from European users into its bank account and then relaying the raised money to overseas projects. Today, members of the Zwiebelfreunde project revealed that German police had raided their Dresden office and the homes of three members located in the cities of Augsburg, Jena, and Berlin. The raids took place on June 20, and police told Zwiebelfreunde members they were in relation to the RiseUp project, a provider of anonymous XMPP and email services.
They aren't accused of anything. They were raided as witnesses. Suppose you donate to Wikipedia, then someone publishes a threat against the president on a Wikipedia page, then your home is raided in order to seek information regarding that threat because you donated to Wikipedia, where the threat was published. Then they confiscate your 3D printed tiny plastic model of the Hiroshima bomb and claim that you were preparing to create an explosion (also because you have sodium persulfate for etching circuit boards).
What "smacks" you is not what happened. The police raided the organization as witnesses in an attempt to gather evidence to track down somebody who made death threats. If they wanted to raid them as suspects for money laundering they could have done it in the decades the organization existed. Don't be daft. It's just bad cops doing their job extremely bad. Furthermore, the raid on CCC just because the cops felt like it "on their own accord" is beyond words and the stuff of oppressive regimes where cops will teach you a lesson by smacking you around for not letting them smack other people around. Get a clue before commenting here.
Because in all probability they will, as always, get away with it, while innocent citizens will perhaps even be prosecuted, instead of being properly compensated.
Reports in the German press made it very clear that those raids very probably were illegal, not the activities of the attacked group. Police even said the group hadn't been under suspicion in the first place, they allegedly were raided because they were thought to have evidence in a case against someone else.
And the group was using RiseUp as a platform for transferring funds only because one of the NGOs they were helping to collect money for uses only that as a payment option. There were and are no hints of "money laundering" whatsoever. On the contrary, groups like the one that was attacked here typically rather belong to circles which strongly oppose and help fight corruption and money laundering.
They even found powdery substances in one room (for etching PCB), concluded that the CCC must be building a bomb and even seized a model of printed. Actually it was a 3D print of Fat Man and a few inches / cm long.
https://twitter.com/annalist/s...
The print translates to:
"Offense: Inducing an Explosion with explosives
"Site of crime: Augsburg
"Time of crime: 2018-06-20
Object (diverse)
red, 3D-Print, likely model of an atomic bomb"
Yes, its true. No, it's not actually funny but police is framing the CCC as a criminal organisation.
German Police is independent of the central government and run by the different states in Germany. Therefore, Merkel has nothing to do with it. Furthermore, would that be first the duty of the minister for the interior.