This post appeared on tails.boum.info, the official site of the Tails live USB, describing a police raid against a group, Zwiebelfreunde, that used to handle their donations. Excepts from a linked blog post by Zwiebelfreunde make clear that this raid by the German state was in connection to a call for protest against a far-right political party made by a group that relies on riseup.net's infrastructure. Therefore, we should see this as part of Germany's continued attack on anarchists and the anti-authoritarian left.
From Tails Blog
On June 20th 2018, German police searched the homes of board members of our former fiscal sponsor Zwiebelfreunde in a coordinated raid. Zwiebelfreunde (Friends of onions in German) is a non-profit organization that supports privacy and anonymity projects and operates several Tor exit nodes.
They are not accused of a crime but considered to be witnesses in a case: the operators of an anonymous website calling for protest against the far-right AfD (Alternative for Germany) party convention used an email address at Riseup, a privacy-friendly email provider to which Zwiebelfreunde facilitates donations.
During the search, computers, storage media, personal items, bank account records, and paper receipts have been confiscated. This unfortunately means that if you have donated to Tails before October 18th 2017 using our European bank account, your data is now in the hands of the German police (IBAN account number, name of account holder, amount, and date). If you donated after this date, you donated to our new fiscal sponsor CCT and not to Zwiebelfreunde.
According to Moritz Bartl, one of the board members, "there's a long history of police using that kind of data to investigate social structures; who's working where, who's involved in which projects, so we have to assume that they are looking into the social networks of people" (Source).
The raid has been strongly criticized by German media and digital rights activists as being disproportionate.
Please join us in supporting our friends at Zwiebelfreunde. We are very grateful for the support they have provided to Tails.
Read more about the case and find links to international press coverage on Zwiebelfreunde's blog.
Posted Thu 05 Jul 2018 05:00:00 PM CEST
Excepts from Zwiebelfreunde's blog post linked above
On June 20th, police raided five locations in Germany, nicely coordinated at 6:00 in the morning: The private homes of all three board members, Jens, Juris and Moritz, our registered headquarters in Dresden (a lawyer’s office), and the home of a previous board member.
The brief summary is that a German left-wing blog “Krawalltouristen” (ruckus tourists) called for protest actions around the right-wing AfD party convening in Augsburg, Germany. Law enforcement argues that this includes calls for violence.
The German police were interested in finding the authors of said blog, and deemed it appropriate to not ask for information or go after the email provider the blog happened to be using, riseup.net, but after the German entity Zwiebelfreunde.
Zwiebelfreunde has a partnership with Riseup Labs, a US non-profit, and manages donations via European wire transfers for the Riseup collective. We spend the money in collaboration with the collective on software development, travel reimbursements, and for Riseup’s Tor infrastructure.
First of all, here’s a list of things we have strong reason to believe are not affected, and can still be considered safe:
any Torservers related infrastructure: Tor relays, mail servers, web servers
any of Riseup’s infrastructure (because we have nothing to do with that)
cryptoparty.in or other cryptoparty related infrastructure
PGP keys, SSH keys, OTR keys etc
They seized most of our electronical storage equipment (disks, laptops, PCs, GnuPG Smartcards/Yubikeys), but it is safe to assume that they will not be able to break the encryption (or the smartcards). They also took our mobile phones, but even if they were to break into them, no login data or anything else affecting our infrastructure or communications is stored on those phones.
Apart from encrypted media, they had the legal right to seize documents related to our Riseup bank account starting from January 2018. They also went and got those from our bank, the GLS Gemeinschaftsbank. However, we have to keep records and receipts of all expenditures for tax reasons. These documents were “safely” kept in a secure fire-proof safe.
Despite our protests, they additionally seized all printed documents relating to our own and partner projects since the inception of the association in 2011.
This includes highly sensitive personal data of donors, identities of activists that received reimbursements or payments, and a list of our members.
If you have ever donated to Torservers, or Tails or Riseup via a European bank transaction, your data is very likely now in the hands of the German police. (IBAN account number, name of account holder, amount and date)