Slashdot Mirror
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.
Exactly what you can expect from the Stasi bitch.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
They don't like it when you as an individual "go dark", but they can't stand it when you start teaching others to do it too and will use all manner of "persuasion" up to and including "facilitating child pornography" just because you believe in communications that are both convenient and secure.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
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.
Sometimes they would raid places just for having a star-of-david or not cooking on Saturday.
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 that helps keep some sanity in the public debate on IT and laws concerning it.
However, that the police behave as a bunch of stupid douchebags when it comes to dealing with the CCC is classic stuff. We've had this since the 80ies and as someone who sympathizes with them I always keep a backup of my data hidden in some unusual place in case some idiot thinks that because I use the CLI I'm some evil hacker or something and comes to take all my hardware.
"Guns are real, blue uniforms are real, cops are social fiction." - Robert Anton Wilson
My two eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Sounds like the usual, money is changing hands and the government isn't getting their cut.
Because the least you could've done was fish up the CCC press release and add that as a link.
Consider the Stasi from the 1950-60's. How they stopped to look at all publication, movement, communications.
The Stasi could not trust their own workers politically and any existing law enforcement in the wider East Germany.
When East Germany was more confident in its ability to keep watch over people it allowed more select people more visits and trips from the West.
Why? The Stasi then had enough informants and their own new trusted surveillance in place to allow such meetings and visits.
Bait and as a trap under constant watch.
Before that the Stasi had to act quickly on any information. Just like the German police doing "raids" in 2018.
The German police are at point with new telco technology that they don't like and don't understand.
The work of the NSA, GCHQ, BND is well understood. Total collection, junk encryption used by computers in Germany.
The difficulty for the German police is they have too many internal domestic and very German political problems.
They cant trust their own staff as too many politically correct staff got hired on demographics have now entered the German police without any consideration for German security.
That has totally weakened decades of once West German and now German internal security inside the German police force. Nothing stays a secret within the German police as its own new workers walk information out.
The German police have to act too quickly using very limited legal telco support services.
The tools allowed for the German police to work on domestic telco networks legally are not useful in 2018. Reports that end in a phone number and an ip range.
A modern pen register https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... so the German police never get too powerful, smart or political again.
German police need BND tools to enter computer networks in real time and see content not just get an ip range from a telco/ISP.
Nobody would detect such remote access and no raid would show any police work was done.
The result is German police can respond to an ip range legally. They know its not what they need but its all they can legally get.
When all the German law allows is to find an ip range, the police go back to look into every ip. Quickly before the information walks back to new staff who have filled the lower ranks of the German police.
What german police need is something like a new GCHQ "Spy Smurfs" for todays phone networks.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/... (Jan 27 2014)
Tracker Smurf for location.
Nosey Smurf for that live mic.
Dreamy Smurf to get power on when the user has selected "power" off.
With such modern tools the German police would never need to show anything ongoing by doing such raids.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
If the government doesn't like what you're doing and lets you know it, stop doing it. It's that simple. If you keep going your own way after being warned, don't complain when they use overwhelming force against you. You should be aware of the fact that as a simple citizen you exist at the whim of the State. Know your place. Follow the rules.
>Here’s a small sample of what Congress funded through the Broadcasting Board of Governors (through Radio Free Asia and then through the Open Technology Fund) between 2012 and 2014:
>LEAP, an email encryption startup, got just over $1 million. LEAP is currently being used to run secure VPN services at RiseUp.net, the radical anarchist communication collective.
>Open Whisper Systems, maker of free encrypted text and voice mobile apps like TextSecure, RedPhone, and Signal, got a generous $1.35-million infusion.
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.
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.
Uhm, that's just how basic money laundering works.... So that could certainly be a basis for doing a raid if it's not clear where the money came from.
They {...} will use all manner of "persuasion" up to and including "facilitating child pornography" just because you believe in communications that are both convenient and secure.
Fuck you, {...etc...} PEDOPHILE!
It might be some random coprolalia-affected troll, but in the current context of this thread, there might by some "wooshing" sound that got lost somewhere.
Post should get some "+1, Funny" love by mods, in my humble opinion.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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 ]
Whereas ethnic groups are forming 'no-go zones' all around Europe, where police cannot enforce the rule of law. Much easier to raid some White computer nerds setting up servers instead.
you stand by terrorists, you are a terrorist. Deal with it. the world is fed up with you, anftifa. you wanted to play war? you got war, it just took a bit longer.
You tellin' me German police abused their power? Gestapo out of here!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
So much better in the land of freedumbs..
Not the German people (the indigenous Germans), that's for sure.
This is another example of the control of free speech by the criminals in power.
...is a thought crime. If you know of or hear of anyone being private, report them to the thought police immediately. Failure to do so is harbouring a criminal and leaves you subject to prosecution and enhanced interrogation.
If you don't want your browsing habits and some other data to be tracked by facebook, Google, LinkedIN and other advertising companies, it's become a necessity to use secure connections.
Ghostery, uBlock and others are great and all, but it's getting to the point where they aren't cutting it with all tracking and surveillance out there.
And this article show's EXACTLY why "if you do nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about" is bullshit. It's gotten to the point where wanting privacy and staying off of social media is being considered kooky and suspicious.
You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOOOOOOO! MOOOOOOO! Moo cows MOOOOOO! Moo say the cows. YOU BAVARIAN COWS!!
âoeI know nothing! Mmmmnothing!â
I'm drafting an email to the both my local and Germany's information institutions. I donated to tails and now German police have my details for no reason. I'm wondering how this will play out under GDPR
Because we don't really know what the reasoning was -- only the target organization's claims about what that reasoning must have been.
In Germany, as in the US, to execute a search you need a warrant issued by a magistrate, specifying the places to be searched and methods of search to be used. They have to convince a judge that there's evidence to be found, but they don't have to lay out their entire reasoning to the target of the investigation.
I'm not saying that the warrants couldn't be based on stupid reasoning, or that the cops didn't engage in stupid behavior, particularly in the search of the associated hackerspace. It's almost guaranteed that if you mix "cops", "technology" and "search" something stupid is going to happen at some point in the proceedings. However we won't know if the reasoning behind the warrants is stupid until charges are brought against someone.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Are people really surprised? Or do most people here fake it so they can be outraged in a one sided way
You have a good point, the main issue is that some of these tools are used primarily by those people who are up to no good.
The people who need Tor are the primary users and they're up to no good. Average people aren't using it in large enough numbers, they don't have enough reason to and it's really slow.
It's interesting watching a generally tech-savvy community (like us here) adopt so much wilful ignorance.
(a repost of something I repied to someone in one of the threads of this ost).
Let's suppose that it turns out that donations your site (this, wikipedia, whatever) collects end up, after some investigation, further downstream, actively funding fundamentalist, violent terrorism, or something less sensational but equally bad if not worse, putting more fuel in the furnaces driving mass migration.
Why wouldn't law enforcement organisations taking their job go seriously go take a good hard look at who is inserting the pennies in this piggy bank?
(This form of crowd-assisted donation-for-a-good-cause-facade form of money laundering never ever happens in the real world of course, and we don't have a whole bunch of violent pseudo-state actors glean a meaningful part of their revenue come in through such activity. Totes doesn't happen. Right?)
I want net neutrality as much as the next Slashdotter. But trying to wheel out the idealist pristine versions of net neutrality ideology from days bygone, before it got abused to drive geopolitical-scale harm and mass migration from half a planet that failed at building functional states, and in the process belittling the challenges of modern day law enforcement (rather than understanding them and having a honest conversation about what realistic best-of-both-worlds mix of online rights and law enforcement can/should be achieved) is not intellectually honest. It's stoking an emotion inside ourselves by singing the hymn of one position in a discussion. It's our own little version of Alex Jones.
We can't will the problems modern day law enforcement are there to solve away by ignoring them and going all libertarian (and to those who do... you may whistle libertarian tunes, but you live in the world made liveable by the functioning state around you, I presume you're not where the mass migrations are coming from. If you want your libertarian fantasy so much, you can find the magic land of no law enforcement there...). The problems are here to stay. We have to understand and solve them.
-
The main people using encryption are people buying things from Amazon.
The real criminals are probably* using pencil and paper. Why not ban those?
* based on the assumption that most criminals are dumb fucks - clearly born out by a visit to your local penitentiary.
Immermann argued:
I don't believe only the wealthy would be interested - but that only the wealthy would be able to afford a private police force sufficiently dedicated to their job to do any good.
Look, the notion that a purely libertarian human society could ever exist for longer than say, six weeks or so (by which I mean, "just long enough for its inhabitants to begin acting like normal human beings"), aside, the model upon which you seen to be predicating your statement appears to disregard the reality that private, first-responder companies (the classic example being volunteer fire departments) have been formed to provide their services to subscribers for the past several millenia, at least.
You want protection from fires? Hire the local fire department to respond to them when you call. Pay extra, and you get a guaranteed response time, with specified financial penalties for failing to get their engine to your door within that time. And the same, I'm certain, would occur with police service in this theoretical society. Want protection from crime on the street? Hire one of the local security companies to patrol your neighborhood. They're pretty sure to offer premium protection services, too, but I'm dead certain they'd provide a basic, minimum level of protection against street crime within their service area as a subscription service.
(However, right about there, we find ourselves facing one of points where human rights smack head-first into the ideals of the libertarian society, because now we need a justice system to deal with captured miscreants. Without it, you leave the question of their dispositon to the whim of the captors - i.e. the police - or their subscribers, depending on what their contract specifies. There'd be no institutional, societally-mediated process for determining their guilt or innocence without imposing some form of government on the humans who live there, so where does that leave you, if you find yourself wrongly accused? Tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail, if you leave it up to a jury of the local residents who want to participate. If the police decide, you'd likely be robbed of the personal property you're carrying, beaten to a pulp, and dumped at the edge of town. Or just shot.)
Anyway, I'm just sayin' ...
(Posting as AC only so as not to undo prior upmods in this thread.)
--
Check out my novel ...
The left:
"You don't need guns, the police will protect you"
"The police does a lot of unjust things" or straight "ACAB"
The right:
"Blue lives matter", "All cops are honorable perfect humans"
"Everyone should have a gun, just in case they're not"
Both sides have their contradictions, yet the latter makes a little more sense.