Wow, so the witnesses are treated like criminals now.
Please note: I do still, from what I read here, find this excessive use of power. A normal warrant with a request for data could very well have been enough, but that's guessing what kind of evidence the police expected to find.
That seems ridiculous. I mean, there's no way that Zwiebelfreunde would have any data about Riseup's email accounts. Even Riseup claims to retain nothing.
I suppose that Zwiebelfreunde might have handled contributions to Riseup from someone using the targeted email address. So there might be a money trail. But that's pretty iffy.
This is the police. We have reason to believe you've witnessed a crime somewhere at some time.
Please willingly give us all of your electronics right now. Yes we know you need them for work, for living, and that they cost thousands of USD.
No we cant tell you when we'll give them back.
Thanks Politie
However, the raid is still out of bounds in certain other aspects (though I suspect the "take everything" the police pulled is more related to the officers having no idea what a server is vs a desktop computer. It wouldn't be the first time police officers simply don't know so they take it all)
This was enough justification for the bavarian police to raid Zwiebelfreunde and various other hacker spaces and persons linked to them[1]. To illustrate how overreaching the police was: When the Zwiebelfreunde's hacker space was raided they found this 3d printed model of a bomb[0], which of course is just a plastic toy. However, they accused the people in hacker space of planning a bombing, so they could seize more stuff.
[0] https://www.thueringen24.de/img/incoming/crop214771927/17338...
[1] https://blog.torservers.net/20180704/coordinated-raids-of-zw...
Not saying they did have plans for a bombing, but if I were planning one, I would have a few toy bombs around to practice with. Definitely not going to try fitting a live bomb into a backpack to see if it fits...
Treating witnesses in such a manner is reprehensible and abusive.
I tried that when I got raided and had all my stuff taken. The only thing that happened was the officer that suggested the warrant as his first measure got barred from promotions for a year, maybe, they weren't so clear about specifics.
Zwiebelfreunde: https://www.torservers.net/donate.html
I would have thought the reason for the raid was to collect physical evidence and that whatever the German equivalent to FinCEN[1] is could just pull anyone's financial records up anytime.
Is it simply fear of being targeted? It's not a crime to donate is it?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Crimes_Enforcement_N...
In Germany it is not so easy. Even though the requirement for the state to get info about somebody's bank account is lowered, they still need some justification.
>I would have thought the reason for the raid was to collect physical evidence
For that reason alone the police wouldn't have to seize this 3d printed model of a nuclear bomb. Police stated, that „they might be planning a bomb attack“. This raid was also a display of power, to intimidate.
>why it's a problem that your account data would be in the hands of the police?
All people who donated are now on a list in some police department, maybe called „Connected to left extremism“. As donating is not a crime (both Zwiebelfreunde and RiseUp are registered organizations in their countries), this will not lead to prosecution alone.
But just because it wasn't illegal does not mean the police won't investigate if they feel like it.
And whenever they want to target you (even if the reason is unrelated), they can look up their lists and tell the judge: „Well, person X donated to this suspicous looking site, makes him suspicious, right?“ This might play a role in court or for new justifications (f.e. the police wants to raid your home, too).
[0] https://www.thueringen24.de/img/incoming/crop214771927/17338...
I would be pretty pissed off if the NYPD compiled a database of my political donations without probable cause.
> whatever the German equivalent to FinCEN
FinCEN doesn’t have a comprehensive database of transactions. Banks, collectively, do. But for smaller non-suspicious transactions, FinCEN must reach out to banks to collect the data. Requesting political donations for lots of individuals without a warrant would be odd.
I'm still a little distressed at how few web-anything providers accept Monero.
Privacy focused email services and cloud service providers should be using it
but what we really have is protonmail only accepting credit cards and nobody seems to see the irony in that.
occassionally in the past I have found email and cloud service providers accepting Bitcoin, and I shapeshifted Monero over TOR to pay for the invoice. Nobody knows who I am and they received the bitcoin they were looking for.
But that was YEARS ago, 2015? 2016? Seems the possibilities have gotten worse for now
I was shocked when I saw that. It's a total disconnect. Why not Bitcoin? All decent VPN services accept Bitcoin. ScryptMail accepts Bitcoin. Even VFEmail does.
Even worse, if you create a ProtonMail account via Tor, you can't use even the free tier unless you provide card and number numbers. That's worse than even Facebook!
Right, which is hilarious.
> As always with great (/s) solutions proposed on HN
Using an opportunity to patronize without understanding my perspective at all. Interesting... (cont.)
> it's neither simple, nor are there any great incentives for providers or is there consumer demand.
Despite not knowing or caring that I would agree with this.
Anyway! The landscape of cloud service providers always has providers that don't care about outsized consumer demand. Therefore this seems to be more of an educational issue as well as an assertiveness issue distinct from one related to the practicality of running a cloud service.
Security and privacy aren't binary options, it's a multi-dimensional spectrum where the optimal point depends on your threat model, budget and other factors. For me, it's not relevant if the police finds out if I use protonmail.
If they were doing the same for the other side - i.e. funneling right wing money to support NAZI activist it would be the same kind of stupid.
If you don't want to get your servers to be raided just don't side-hustle as an extremist shaddow financier.
German has one of the most elaborate spying-on-its-own-citizens dragnet around the world. This sting operations are just to bully/frighten anyone who dares not to bow their heads.
Citation needed. The amount of surveillance in Germany is much lower than e.g. the USA or UK.
Although that's more targeted, less dragnet.
It has more upvotes in less time than any other post on the front page. The top post has 35 upvotes in 2 hours.
This post is falling off the front page with 81 upvotes in less than an hour.
This is completely sketch.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Zwiebelfreunde%20points%3E30&s...
When a story is ongoing, moderators downweight follow-ups unless and until they contain significant new information. Otherwise the discussions tend to be repetitive, reacting only to the original event which has already been discussed, and more likely to attract unsubstantive and flamewar-style comments, as well as complaints from other users about the same story reappearing too many times.
This approach is something we figured out after the Great Snowden Avalanche of 2013, and it has turned out to be a good balance that serves HN well.
AfD is a group that is essentially the Nazi Party 2.0.
The German police raided the host of Torservers.net in an effort to hunt down people protesting against AfD, and it seems to have been conducted as some sort of scare tactic (which would be unfortunate if Germany is actually helping a modern Nazi party).
More information here: https://blog.torservers.net/20180704/coordinated-raids-of-zw...
https://augsburgfuerkrawalltouristen.noblogs.org/
> They are hunting down people protesting AfD
They are trying to stop the AfD party convention, the blog describes which Autobahns members are likely to take and threatening Hotels if they allow AfD-Members. This kind of stuff had happened at every prior party convention of the AfD. The city actually organized a peaceful protest.
> They are the new Nazi Party
Some of their leaders have trivialized Nazi Crimes in the past.
Need to define "protest". Maybe they called for Neo-Nazis to be killed or hurt. In that case, the state has the monopoly of violence.
