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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.
Just reading that brief description is enough to make me think that group is suspicious. Tor & money donations, overseas money distribution? It just smacks of money laundering to me. I doubt the police would raid on that alone they probably have some tip or informant that's backing up that suspicion.
Like all credible citizen movements the Chaos Computer Club has moved from being perceived as a smelly group of hippies to a respected independant organization
They were better back when they were hacking banks.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If you're "securing communications" for people who then use it for child porn, you are opening yourself up to being accused of that no matter your alleged altruistic intentions.
Hey, you know, what else those evil child pornographer are using ?
Digital photocamera, SD cards, computers, internet, printers, paper.
They might even sometime wear clothes, and eat food !
Ban all of the above, because pedo-peddlers might by using it too !!!~~
The purpose of tools like Tor, GPG, OTR, Axolotl, etc. is to help guarantee privacy and secure communication. It might be abused by people with nefarious intention, but it also has tons of legitimate reasons (think find a away accroos the Chinese Great Firewall, think protecting from corporate espionage, think whistle blower who want to help journalist report on a scandal, etc.)
These are useful tools.
You shouldn't deprive people from their everyday usefulness, just because the tools might fall in the hands of some criminal.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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.
The same goes for Black Lives Matters, but that didn't stop Russian oligarchs connected to Putin from funding some of their initiatives.
I'm not saying this is the case. It's probably not the case. But really, it's not like those authorities will tell us the truth of why they made those raids (if it damages their case in any way and if German law doesn't require them to).
And in non capitalistic states they just murder you