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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.
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
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).
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.
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 ]
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.