Anne Roth, a political scientist who’s now a researcher on the German NSA inquiry, tells me perhaps the most chilling story. How she and her husband and their two children – then aged two and four – were caught in a “data mesh”. How an algorithm identified her husband, an academic sociologist who specialises in issues such as gentrification, as a terrorist suspect on the basis of seven words he’d used in various academic papers.
Seven words? “Identification was one. Framework was another. Marxist-Leninist was another, but you know he’s a sociologist… ” It was enough for them to be placed under surveillance for a year. And then, at dawn, one day in 2007, armed police burst into their Berlin home and arrested him on suspicion of carrying out terrorist attacks.
This is not tinfoilhattery or paranoia, not anymore. Get flagged once for any reason at all, and EVERYTHING in your communication history gets reviewed, re-interpreted, with the already established bias of guilt. This is not even a perversion of justice, because the term implies that justice system was actually involved.
And that was in 2007.
I once quipped that Orwell was an optimist. In the brave new world we live in, that statement has finally lost its amusement value.
That said, while there was plenty of probable cause to justify a search warrant [2] (as far as I can tell), the arrest warrant was all kinds of questionable, even considering the additional incriminating evidence that was found as the result of the search [3]. As the Federal Court of Justice noted when they vacated the arrest warrant [1], all the prosecution could prove was him having connections with the extreme left, but no evidence that he was involved in terrorist activities. And having extreme left sympathies and writing extreme left articles may be criminally stupid, but it's not a crime.
With regard to "bursting into their Berlin home", the article also does not mention that Holm had been a member of the "Wachregiment Feliks Dzierzynski" [4], an elite paramilitary regiment under the command of the Stasi. Together with Holm's undoubted connections with the extreme left, law enforcement could be excused for assuming that he may be dangerous.
The real concern is that the prosecution kept pushing even when it became increasingly clear that they caught the wrong guy (along with the actual perpetrators); thankfully, the courts would have none of it (this time).
[1] http://juris.bundesgerichtshof.de/cgi-bin/rechtsprechung/doc... (judgement vacating the arrest warrant against Andrej Holm, in German)
[2] Strictly speaking, German criminal procedure law has different requirements for searches compared to US law, but there's a "probable cause"-like element, and from the looks of it, the prosecution would have had probable cause under the US standard, too.
[3] The standard for an arrest warrant is "dringender Tatverdacht", meaning that the suspect is very likely to be the perpetrator, based upon available evidence; it's a higher standard than what is necessary to prosecute, which requires only that a conviction is likely, not very likely. An additional requirement for an arrest warrant is that the suspect is either (1) likely to flee or to (2) engage in obstruction of justice or (3) has been previously convicted of serious crimes and there is substantive evidence that he or she may commit other serious crimes.
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Dzerzhinsky_Guards_Regime...
The notion that they were subject to surveillance and arrested based on using seven words is a little far-fetched to me. Surveillance is pretty damn expensive, and I'm pretty confident they weren't the only people to use those words.
Again, not necessarily saying they're lying, but I'd love to know where the information comes from.
Or as someone put it long before I was born,
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
While "consumer privacy rights" mean that you are much more protected against companies in Europe, privacy rights vis-a-vis the governments are virtually non-existant.
If you go back and look through the Snowden leaks, you can see that the UK, France, and Germany have extremely deep spying practices with _absolutely no pretense of privacy concerns_. At least in the US we're trying (or at least pretending to try).
To my knowledge the craziest thing like this that has happened on US soil is people being held up in the airport (I am prepared to stand corrected on this point).
For at least the case of France, I can state with certainty that the NSA has much more restrictions in place than the DGSE has for spying on its own citizens (and others).
By spouting the "US pressured Europe to act on these things" meme, we're doing nothing but harm. We're reducing the agency of these governments in the decisions they'll wilfully take up anyways, and missing some gaping holes in European civil rights.
One of the seven words was “precarisation”, which had been used in a statement by arsonists. Anne Roth was a former squatter and founded Indymedia Germany.
7 words trawled from all of your combined words of everything you published and no doubt a bunch of stuff you thought was private. You just used that word too, kirsebaer and you did it because you are guilty.
Precarisation just means the process of more people falling into tenuous economic circumstances. It's a common topic of discussion in the US....the only difference is that word doesn't really exist in casual English.
Orwellian references seem definitely overdrawn, in regard to this case.
Apparently a group was going around burning things in Germany, and publishing long tracts about their acts. Linguistic analysis seemed to link those tracts to her husbands research papers. The whole "7 words" quote seems to be a (wilful or not) misinterpretation of facts : the writing style was probably similar.
As someone else mentioned, this person used to be a squatter in East Berlin in the 90s , so one could guess a bit of an anti-authority type. At least that's how the reasoning could go.
I predict pretty amazing things due to ccc, the general attractiveness of Berlin as a place to live, cost (half of the Bay Area), less crappy immigration policies, and the privacy/security brand due to people like Poitras.
The problem with the Blue Card, from my [non-German/EU citizen] perspective, is that it's a work visa, which means you must have a job offer, and one that pays at least 37K EUR annually, to get the visa. Likewise if you lose that job, you've got just a short time to find another one or get out. The Blue Card is not a visa for those expecting to work at a German startup and compensated mostly with equity. In other words, not a visa for most founders.
Not necessarily. Rising prices in desirable cities is not a law of nature; it's a political principle, because most Western cities restrict development, leading to supply shortfalls and price rises. Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City describes both the political dynamics and their problems well: http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Health...
Back in October 2013, the European Court of Justice ruled that collecting fingerprints was a privacy incursion but that the greater need for security outweighed the privacy concern.
Perhaps that's not directly the NSA. But it's a legitimate reason to have a home somewhere that does not constantly put you through such. And she's not the only one in such a position.
I agree with your opinion that the German government and agencies may not be the most sympathetic. A significant portion of the German public, on the other hand...
The Stasi are still a fairly fresh memory, for many.
Including, no doubt, for the chancellor, Angela Merkel.
"She is ... the first German Chancellor to be born after World War II, and the first post-reunification Chancellor to be raised in the former East Germany" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Merkel]
These are activists who ostensibly haven't committed any crimes, but suspect they're under surveillance, or get harassed for being activists and want to go somewhere where the culture seems to be deeply and overtly set against state sponsored spying on the populace.
[1] https://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/soldiers-allege-laura-p...
That's a good three hours to essentially get anyone outside Germany's jurisdiction if the USA really wants to force the issue "extraordinary rendition" style.
Given how much Germany (both government and populace) cared when it was about a German citizen, I doubt there would be notable outrage when it's about an American.
If Snowden had leaked usable information about microwave weapons and quantum computers the Russians would not have merely accepted him... they'd be willing to go to war for him.
Makes you wonder if the Snowden leaks weren't just a big PsyOp on the BRICS. ;)
This opinion is understated.
While I wouldn't go as far as to make guesses as to what the real classified data is now-a-days, I would like to point out that nearly all of the reveals thus far from the recent round of whistleblowers read basically like the transcripts to the cypherpunks mailing list over the past twenty years.
My fear is that everyone will gloss over that, and then continue discrediting such lists and their users far into the future as 'tinfoil hattery' and the like.
See: Vorratsdatenspeicherung, TED Talk by Malte Spitz, George Maaßen. Laws don't apply here to the intelligence apparatus either.
1. Berlin politics is less hyper-media based
One of the benefit of Berlin isn't added liberty but a less hyper-media based political environment. One can see this in how the various political "Stiftung" funded and continue to fund open discourse around the issue of the surveillance. This environment may also be part to blame for the lack of strong response, but it may also be partially responsible for Appelbaum and Laura still being able to get their visa's renewed.
2. It's just the better ghetto
The truth is there is nowhere safe for digital activists right now. That is to say there is nowhere that any of the people interviewed could live to reduce their need to worry if their house is being monitored. There is no country, of sufficient weight, that has proven they would not bend their will to that of a greater power. With there being no safe place, peace of mind can be found more easily in a ghetto with like minded individuals. And berlin, definitely when it comes to digital rights and privacy, has a very lively ghetto. You may not be safer in Berlin, but at least you are not alone
