German police raid homes of Tor-linked group's board members (opens in new tab)

Wow, imagine being raided by police and having all your stuff stolen, just because the police allege that you helped someone do something "anti-government".

Tor board, I would offer you my help, but I'm an American, so we would probably all be sent to Guantanamo

Heavily discussed 1-2 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17456289 (333 points/130 comments)

another example of tried overreach: a branch of the federal police, "staatsschutz", raided the posteo office in 2013 and claimed to have a warrant to seize _everything_. posteo immediatedly pushed back and it turned out that the police only had a warrant for a single document [0](in german, tho). like the investigating officers wouldn't be aware of this. it's their modus operandi.

what they also like to do is to adjust events in hindsight such that it suits their story. the case I have in mind concerns the NRW state police, but that, too, seems to be common strategy. in this case, which is very recent, a protester was arrested and police claimed, in their official report, that the protester physically assaulted the officer and resisted arrest. the protester disputed this, but without evidence would not have stood a chance in court. moreover, the protester was badly injured during the whole ordeal. now a video turns up and what do you see?: no physical assault, no resistance [1](also in german). in such cases, i am glad that we live in the age of mobile phones, where anyone can take recordings.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posteo [1] http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/wuppertal-fall-von-polize...

I guess a big lesson here is: keeping the data on paper made it less secure.

The police made overreach on top of overreach and grabbed as much as they could, far exceeding their warrant. They now have historical donor records for an unrelated organization, when the warrant should have limited them in scope and history. But the police can't compel them to unlock their encrypted hard drives. If they kept that info on encrypted disk it would have been safe.

I'm not speaking about the events in the OP, but generally I think people do their cause harm when they say things such as the following (there are several more examples in the article):

After the raids, Bartl was forced to take a break from work. He said that he assumes, given his work on digital rights issues, that he may be under surveillance. Bartl also expressed concern that future donors may also face scrutiny, financially hurting the group's projects.

Sometimes (I know nothing about these incidents), some of the reasons for these actions are to intimidate you and disrupt your work. Letting them know you are intimidated and disrupted not only encourages the bully, it spreads those consequences much more widely than just you: It demoralizing people who follow you, who depend on you, and who are in similar positions; and via the news article it spreads the intimidation and disruption to a much wider audience. How many on HN will now have second thoughts? The better response, I think, is f- that; we won't be stopped or intimidated.

This law enforcement overreach and breach of civil freedoms is fucked up.

How is it fair to just sit back and not wage war after persecution like this? If I were in the CCC I'd be fuming and scheming right now. Not sure what sort what the war would look like exactly, but I'd be thinking of something.

> But, under pressure from tax authorities, the organization had compiled paper receipts with names and passport numbers of those the project had reimbursed.

> Bartl said those records have been compromised, putting the identities of those involved at risk.

Pretty sure those records have been compromised the moment you handed them over to the tax authorities.