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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 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.
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
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"
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.
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 ]
They may be, but I fear that doesn't make them that much better... By the way, German law is continually being changed towards less restrictions for the police, towards police getting more protection against citizens, instead of better protecting citizens against unlawfully acting police, while the latter has more and more become normality in Germany (as about everywhere else). And government and politics – even the moderate German left – reliably come to their defence and tend to antagonize criticism and cover even the most blatant police misbehaviour.
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.
And in non capitalistic states they just murder you
Furthermore, would that be first the duty of the minister for the interior. ...
Which is Seehofer, who just had a bitch fight with Merkel over some nonsense
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
German here. Our lawmakers tend to make laws, rules and procedures that promote abuse (or are abuse by themselves). For a really egregious example from the Nazi regime, check this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws
Today things are not THAT bad, but recently there are tendencies toward a police state.
C - the footgun of programming languages
"perfectly normal police behaviour in capitalist states" indeed! Just as in totalitarian states, communist states, authoritarian states, fascist states, and your presumed utopic socialist states, too. Hm... noticing the repeated word? I'm starting to see a pattern here.
Then again, in a truly capitalist state, if ever there were such a thing, the police would barely exist, as there would be very little public money for them. Sadly, such a place does not exist in our world.
Might makes right irrelevant.
Of course the police would still exist - they would simply be private police charged only with protecting and pursing the interests of their wealthy employers. Private property beyond what you can carry exists only with the threat of violence, and the wealthy aren't about to surrender their wealth.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
pursing the interests of their wealthy employers.
The bigger problem, is the wealthy are also not going to be willing to surrender their source of wealth, which is your wealth.
We've had private security forces in the US without much government oversight. They gave the Gestapo a run for their money.
Honestly, I have no interest in any piece of fluff espousing capitalism as an ideal end goal. The entire concept of capitalism is that capital is the ultimate measure of value, which means that so long as inheritance exists, unrestrained capitalism can only end in a neo-aristocracy with minimal social mobility. The only chance for any other outcome would be a political system that explicitly and completely rejects any influence of money on politics - which I don't see how is possible.
Capitalism has much to offer, but only in counterpoint to something like communism, which enshrines the economic value of the common man. Either extreme on it's own is a recipe for disaster.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
"capitalist states". I doubt that police abuse is confined to capitalist states.
Of course not, and it wasn't my intention to insinuate something like that. It's just my impression (and not just mine), that police forces in capitalist first-world states become more and more powerful, aggressive, fitted with more and more rights against the population, the less the capitalist economy is able to keep up widespread prosperity in those states.
Are you seriously claiming police in say Russia and China are more circumspect [...]
Surely not. Now, today Russia as well as China are capitalist states. But of course they weren't "more circumspect" earlier, either.
Again, you are absolutely on point. I would never recommend any "piece of fluff" for your library. So anyway, try reading The Machinery of Freedom.
All irony aside, you're kinda not wrong about inheritance. It's a problem. The problem with this problem, however, is that the solutions that have thus far been proposed have ultimately resulted in problems much, much greater than this one, and mostly don't actually do much to solve the issue, anyway. People who have enough money to care about where it will go when they go where they can't take it tend to have the wherewithal to find ways through, around, and under whatever Kafkaesque system is designed to confiscate their wealth. The only real beneficiaries of the labyrinth tend to be legislators, lobbyists, and lawyers,
I don't pretend to have answers, but I do know what fails. And I believe I might at least have the right questions in hand.
Might makes right irrelevant.