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New proof for surveillance: CCC extends legal complaints against intelligence services and German government

2014-07-16 00:09:00, henning

Investigations by Federal Prosecutor General Harald Range are becoming more urgent after new publications expose data collection explicitly targeting at least one of the Tor servers operated by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) in Germany, feeding the data of the users directly into the surveillance systems of the NSA. The CCC is extending the existing legal complaint against those responsible at the intelligence services and the German government with the new facts and requests to prosecute the illegal intelligence activity against the CCC and all affected users of the anonymization network Tor.

The publication of parts of the search pattern code used in the NSA system XKeyscore [1], [3] provides proof that data traffic to and from a CCC-operated server of the Tor network was explicitly collected and stored. While other documents from the Snowden publications show that currently even the NSA isn't able to entirely de-anonymize Tor, the fact of the now-documented surveillance of the CCC server demonstrates beyond doubt the agressive surveillance with which the NSA targets German citizens.

The legal complaint [2] filed and published in February together with the International League for Human Rights (ILMR) and Digitalcourage e. V. was signed by 1.800 people. So far, it has not been used by the Federal Prosecutor General to initiate prosecution. The authorized lawyers so far haven't been provided with either information or justification for the decision to not open the investigations about the mass surveillance yet.

Why Harald Range is acting on the wiretapping of a single prominent person but doesn't act on the mass-surveillance of large parts of the entire population is beyond comprehension. For this reason we're urging the Federal Prosecutor General to stop blocking investigations and start doing his job to avoid public ridicule. The irresponsible protraction of investigations regarding the crimes and offenses as part of the intelligence scandals enhances suspicion of the Federal Prosecutor General bowing to German as well as international intelligence services on judiciary grounds as well.

The current discussion about spies in the German Bundestag and in German ministries distracts from the real scandal: the mass surveillance of the population and the criminalization of those users who want to protect themselves from the spying. The coordinator for US intelligence activities in Germany, who has been asked by German government to leave the country, should be first questioned by the Federal Prosecutor General, and, if appropriate, charged and brought to trial.

 

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Contact:

H.-Eberhard Schultz and Claus Förster, solicitors
Haus der Demokratie und Menschenrechte, Greifswalder Str. 4, 10405 Berlin
Telefon: 030 43725026, Fax: 030 43725027, cf(at)cfoerster.de