 to those listening already, I'm going to translate this introduction. This year we didn't have a summer miracle, but a kind of drama. The first time since 50 years, journalists were indicted for high treason. That's a few months ago now, and we would like to use this to reflect what happened. Look back and look at the backgrounds, but also look at what's happened since the actual event, what the consequences will be. So in order to do that, please welcome very warmly the founder of NetsPolitik.org, our favorite trader, Markus Becherdahl. For all international guests, if you want to listen to the talk in English, that is totally possible. Please tune into our wonderful translation at 8011. Thank you. Yes, please do. Hi, good morning. Well, if you keep clapping the whole time, I won't get forward with 72 slides. Well, that worked well. André can't behave with us. He has to get some sunlight in the actual sun, the real world one. At the camp, straight after the investigation was crushed, we did report. So the history of all those investigations are touched upon very briefly. More focus on findings, what laws will need to be changed to prevent investigations like that in the future. If you are interested in the whole events, the camp talk is online, of course, and of course, free to download. The story started a year earlier. Last year, we were celebrating 10 years of NetsPolitik.org. And at that birthday, we heard that the chancellery had threatened the members of the investigating committee of the NSA scandal with criminal investigations because documents had been leaked via that Bundestag investigating committee. Now, this procedure was not followed. There was a rumor that Merkel, the chancellor, was against it, being afraid of bad press, if you would be, if you took steps against press, which motivated us to continue. And we were happy about that. In February this year, we published extracts from the budget of the Interior Secret Service, the Verfassung Schutz, which made clear that the service was planning, evaluating internet content, which was interesting because two years after the Snowden revelations, the answer of our government was to simply give our secret services more money to survey and monitor the internet. We thought that it would be nice to debate this, discuss this before it would happen. But the discussion was only possible if the documents were visible in the open. They had been classified. They had been leaked to us. We had space on our servers, so we published them. Didn't get the huge society debate that we were interested in. But it is part of our philosophy to not just have documents and quote from documents, but also, if possible, to hand them to all our readers. We are from the internet. We are used to linking to our sources. And we are used that other people can question our work critically. And we don't believe that we are the very experts on everything. We think that our readers contain many experts that can help us look at documents from different perspectives, and for that, you need the original sources. Which is why after careful deliberation in each individual case, we put them online if we don't threaten anyone, if they're not a hazard to anyone. So back to early this year in April, we got a new budget, which we also put online, which unfortunately nobody at all was interested in because it went online at about five past nine and a quarter past nine The reintroduction of data retention, telecommunication data retention, was announced by Justice Minister, which completely killed the other topic, which was sad because we did want to talk about what our Interior Secret Service is doing, whether that was compatible with the constitution, they do call themselves protection of the constitution, to discuss whether we like this and whether our constitutional court maybe should judge on the admissibility of doing such a thing. So just to put in context what we did there, these were budget plans, which some people say is comparable to cost structure and site online large newspaper, published another puzzle piece, some documents on Ex-KeyScore and what the Interior Secret Service wanted to do with that. We had the budget plans around the introduction of Ex-KeyScore and the other jigsaw piece came from, I think I can't pronounce his name correctly anyway. On the 4th of July, we heard from a radio news service that two articles had been published that led to a communal investigation started called for by the president of the Interior Secret Service. Now interestingly, a new law for that service, extending its rights, had passed the Bundestag only a few days ago, which maybe was connected. Maybe someone at that radio station decided to release this at that time. Maybe there would have been more eyes on that law if that had been published a bit earlier. So we noticed that it was probably us that were meant by this and then we then wondered is that a thing that happens more frequently? We called journalists unions, thought that they would know about this and thought that maybe the 90s was the time that this last happened and we found this kind of strange. And that very Monday we called the state prosecutor but they didn't want to tell us anything and what we then did is to blog about the whole event and wait what would happen. After that article at that radio station, it was about releasing professional secrets, which it would have been bad for our sources if we had been investigated, but we would have been okay. On the 30th of July then there was a letter that kind of disrupted our everyday procedures. The state prosecutor told us that there was an investigation against Andri, myself and our sources since mid-May. So okay, we thought challenge accepted. We blogged about this as well and then we looked at what treason actually means. It's in the criminal code and our lawyers thought this is kind of strange. The code says there has to be an intention to threaten the state. We want a better Germany, one where our fundamental laws are actually enforced, which is kind of the opposite of what treason means. And we thought well, if that's what the law says, we will fight this. And then we informed ourselves where does this come from? This sounds like a thing from old 1960s affairs. The Spiegel magazine had a very famous affair about high treason or country treason. It's a very loaded term. And the short, long and short of it was we had the letter on Thursday, put it online. Sunday we are in the midst of a state crisis. Tuesday the state prosecutor resigns and the few days later the whole thing is quickly buried. But that's when things start. All the things that happened there and the way we evaluated it. We were quite lucky actually because they were investigating us for treason symbolism here. The picture of the old minister that started the proceedings against Spiegel magazine, very conservative politician from the 60s to the 90s. So if they hadn't used paragraph 94, but 95, which is a revelation of state secrets, the hashtag would have been much longer then. So we were kind of lucky that that wasn't used. We were also lucky that they actually informed us by letter as far as we could reconstruct. It looks very much like the state prosecutor had called for an external expertise by a professor close to the Secret Service, the other Secret Service, BND, who then believed that we had actually published a state secret. And if that had but the professor said that he hadn't finished his expertise and had to go on holiday, but had he finished, we probably would have heard about it by being searched our houses and our editor's office. So we understood from that we should be prepared. We can't assume that in Germany it's the state under the rule of law. We would expect we had to expect having a house and offices searched and houses. Now we know and now we're prepared. Should it ever happen? Then we were lucky. It's a David against Goliath kind of scenario. In a new Star Wars age, we are the rebels, the ministers, the emperors. So fantastic symbolism here. We were lucky. And we've had a kind of stress test six years ago when there were internal documents by German railways which republished where we could kind of see the mechanisms of new publicity, strays and effects and these things. We could test those and now we could do the same thing on a larger scale. And the biggest luck we had, we were in the midst of well the summer hole as it's called in Germany. Before that the Greek crisis would have dominated us after that the refugee crisis, but at the exact time that we had this letter, nothing was happening. So thank you. But we had to prove first that we are good citizens and finally we had won a competition in Germany Land of Ideas. The government awarded us several institutions of German government, the Federation of German Industry. We were an awarded base of ideas. So what should we do with this award? We thought should we publish it and that was now the opportunity to do that. There was a somewhat schizophrenic scenario happening here. We've just been recognized by the government and then there's another kind of recognition but on another level interesting. So in any case something happened that we could have foreseen but didn't, the admin was on holiday, the blog was gone. We needed a mirror page to just keep the information online because we had a DOS attack basically by all that interest and suddenly I wasn't able to use Twitter anymore because there was such a lot of information with our hashtags and my browser simply kept crashing and I had to switch off for a while. But there was a huge level of solidarity, fantastic tweets by nine quarterly trust is good, treason is better and lots of links to our donation page because we had the problem. Had we had to fight this through we would have needed a lot of money for all the lawyers and at that point in time we were completely under financed and so we had the funny situation that our international bank account number became a trending topic as a hashtag actually which made our bank fairly proud as well. Just to illustrate what we call the summer hole, this was one of many days at Targa Show DE the website of the main state news broadcaster so nothing else was seen for a while on that site. And another thing a lot of solidarity from state broadcasters ZDF they had that netpolitic.org domain inserted into their news coverage and then the server was gone as well. But we have a new one now so if something like this happens again we can actually carry a bit more load, deal with that. So we had to become even better citizens that's the imitating the famous jest about Chancellor Merkel in that image and then the whole press largely was on our side and supporting us which we had hoped but at that level this huge amount of solidarity we did not really expect and that was fantastic all that all those people having our backs and and the things that we look at suddenly is report about you that's a strange feeling the only sad thing was that we were in the midst of that summer hole because there was no broadcasts by some popular satirizing news programs there was a kind of uproar from conservative members of parliament who didn't quite understand that the whole solidarity the top one there is the president of the committee for the digital agenda in the Bundestag in the German parliament so that was about one day people that had something to say in the conservative parliamentary party had their parties under control their their people under control and and told them we cannot win this game stopped arguing this case and both Bahrain were on conservative interior politician so as ununderstandable as the crushing of the investigation is he then started an attack on on the social democrats so that was a signal to us that the government was starting their withdrawal battle not everyone had understood that hanspitter all very well known hardliner still thinks that isis terrorists would be able to read from those budgets how the interior secret service would act but he has a few other problems too anyway so anyway the other thing that was very convenient it was summer we had a couple of people from my team who wanted to do a demonstration well we thought no that's the usual people but we did a bit of demo two and a half thousand people which was very helpful you can see the reason on quotes to generate just to generate images what we thought after today's where it's all over like a master of justice had to stop his is holiday and it and the media meant oh it's all fine carry on carry on well we were partying and the next day we were in a scandal involved in a scandal what indeed it became international we had to say that well Germany used to be the sort of moral highlights in the international area to pointing at areas where internet bloggers journalists were being repressed well and suddenly there was a case where in Germany journalists were being trying to be threatened using the trees and we're normally our exterior ministry would nearly have intervene that was quite funny for us everywhere we were visible and from Nepal to Greece well in all continents all countries we got we got these pictures we we weren't even able to process all of them but the whole day the telephone was ringing everyone wanted to know from us the craziest media from everywhere and suddenly we were on the Titanic the satirical it's a particular blog and then yeah suddenly culminating in this in this funny news line and the the front the highest media if it's it decided campaign against us well that's funny well how can such a newspaper to like campaign us if they start with one bad ask us the other why we are the bad guys and not the good guys and then using such words as this is blocked out as like area controls or the rule of law and and these people was the role was always if irrelevant see data retention see etc or or the or if the head of the page three talks about talks talks about a mascot for about half a page what what what mascot we never even noticed that that was that that thing was even in our office anyway it was funny but on the other hand we but it was very odd very very strange the it's weird that the all the these politicians are normally on exactly the opposite side of the aisle and normally pointed us and say those are the activists and we're the journalists well they try to sort of disclaim the fact that we are allowed to use journalists we all we've we've done this several times we already know that this so we have we have official information because they gave us badges that we are in fact journalists then we had another sort of side area said side channel well we had it we had to kick out a team from Russia today the only people who didn't sign up and suddenly were in our office and started filming when we thought well that was a bit weird we don't talk to official media who trying to instrumentalize us in order to um in order to relativize the limitations that the journalists have to suffer under in their country we said we would not talk to sort of government-run media whose country is repressed journalists or threatened journalists with the lives or we tweeted that as well and suddenly we are all the conspiracy theorists we also already had that as a sort of separate fight we had that we haven't suddenly we we had a lot we had a lot of death threats because suddenly i was i was responsible for the ukraine conflict or because i was in the green young greens movement when i was 13 well i i don't know i don't know somehow we we got a lot of well let's move on to this this mystery mystery x x y broom we keep asking ourselves why why why did the attorney general start this investigation if even if it was obvious to everyone that this intention to damage the republic was was not present it's obvious the only explanation we have is that there was some kind of political pressure from the part of the interior security ministry from the part of the interior ministry or maybe from the chancellery well the question is why was there's nobody want to be responsible well then the other finger wasn't clear or the other thing which became clear afterwards well as soon as we hear hear about this treason this treason about revealing secrets well they they were investigating against our sources and they referenced the the ruling from 2007 in 2005 there was a search at the city zero there's a magazine and monthly magazine following that because it was related to there was some some reveal revelation of secrets or state secrets and at the time the federal crown borough together with oscar shillett interior ministry tried to search and seize evidence about the sources the high court said in 2007 and due to this is not a sufficient basis for this kind of searches and with us they tried they tried it even a level higher well if the one thing was being was was being a ruler's unconstitutional by the high court we try let's try the next level up well we would have liked to fight this all the way to get another ruling well unfortunately they dropped them very quickly so we didn't get the opportunity to to have it clarified in front of a court and to make it clear that we were in the right the whole time then we had the hands go must not the president of a in the emperor as mentioned earlier the interior secret service already mentioned it on the 4th of May already announced it on the symposium of the secret service where the where the where the aforementioned journalist was allowed to moderate which was the first person who who dropped hints about this he already meant at the time that that our work or this kind of leaking leaking journalists like us was seriously damaging to the work of these secret services and furthermore he mentioned that there was there was secret additional information that was being printed well we don't have a print so we all put it on the internet but well anyway it doesn't matter well we used that as an excuse to come out with another series of stickers which you can get at the front here afterwards netspolitik.org threatens the work of our secret services the other thing that was very interesting was that Marsden tried to like get out of it was to be like in this innocent he was just doing his duty someone had to do it the sort of in the last few years there have been three indictments due to the revelation of secrets or leaking of documents to journalists from the side of from the 67 and there were three and two of us direct against us well this the exterior secret has not done this well that he said well that's completely normal he was suggesting that this is a very super normal process and that he had nothing to do with it well because the indictments were against an unknown person well we well you know when we got the indictments um well that's what they looked like well just to sort of as a sort of wink wink nudge nudge well they these sort of indictments against an unknown person had our names so the by the way the internal secretive managed to misspell my name twice in two different elements fortunately there's no no no person in Germany that is has a similar name to me but the problem was though what does it mean if you're suddenly if you're being uh being suspected because you have an unknown name well okay our lawyers later become became the censored became the censored file got the censored only got the censored files well we assume that the files were were being created in power do they have several notes about chats between the um the ceremonies via email or via by telephone but they were not finished there was we seemed very weird to lawyers but we would have liked to publish the files because we were not allowed to see them because they're more apparently they've had a more secret than the documents that we published apparently since because the internal secret service had to explain the attorney general in a report why indeed we reveal them and indeed this report is more is more secret than the actual documents they published well it's it's weird the bizarreity is incredible well then well we realized oh oh just in general uh just for height's reason well they could have been listening to us for two or three months that was all within the realm of possibility for a few moments we we thought what's what's happening all right for a few moments we thought all right we could have a problem if they've like put bugs everywhere well they said later on they said or the federal criminal only had a very low level of investigation we call we can trust them maybe but the problem is how how very verifiable is the the statement that the internal secret service has not been checking us well you know if there are side effects well ask the with victims of the uh nazi scandal then we had the problem various representatives of the government well what didn't quite say the truth to the representatives of the media for example the harbour the secretary of the interior well the president of the secret service at some point told us the intention or we didn't do anything else well later on we it was discovered that the interim ministry was obviously knew about it and they also knew about the charges thomas the missy the interim ministry obviously didn't know anything about well at the site the um the the charges the charges against these these uh perpetrators was only got to sort of um official system after they came into the media well this is the system dim as air um just as a fan fact the the the husband of emilia harbour was was the guy who was being surveilled as part of the nsa uh with the selectors then there was a whole the massive press conference on the monday after we published it for a whole hour loads of questions well then the um there's the press representative of the of the secret service said he talked to all the people who would be relevant no one knew anything this is awesome awesome rhetoric rhetoric ie it's just um obfuscation tactics or later on in the april somehow they knew about these the chancellor he knew about that they know the plans and we assume that they already talked about the strategy who took part in this well unfortunately we don't know we we they don't you know list who the participants are for these important meetings well then the um parliament asked all the individual ministries who was there and several ministries were able to answer that their secretaries hadn't these been there well it would have been possible to tell us but no one really wanted to be responsible for it furthermore we asked the the green party that i've been ready to ask if it was normal that these these sort of intention that these these were being only mentioned on the side these important things the uh the the government oh yeah it's super normal that that's super normal don't don't panic finally the ministry of justice knew two months two months earlier including the minister who later on said or we had to we had to like terminate this immediately oh apparently it turns out that later i have to speed up sorry oh what is happening all right i need a new book all right what can we learn from this all right first we need a new definition of a secret at the moment the the government gets to choose what the official entity gets choose what is a secret we need a new definition that says that the contemporary happenings that are current is that our public interests are not secrets that they cannot be covered by the articles on say secret this would help journalists a lot not to be currently threatened by this sort of Damocles we need a law protecting whistleblowers that actually deserves the name apparently we're still a third world country as far as whistleblower protection is concerned yeah yeah i know i know i'm carrying up all right what's going on here furthermore we had we're lucky andria andria we are we are you know we're employed we have we have journalists well we have other people who are volunteering for us if they had had this written the same story they would have not has many many rights as for us for example for example they would have not had the right to stay silent they would have had to first of all fight for it in front of the court in order to clarify this is by you know it's based on the employment appointment we say that the freedom of press should be for everyone who follows the official decrease and rules of journalists and not just for the people who are making money off of it anyway furthermore in order to protect our sources the data attention needs to be gone there for there are many other reasons to get rid of it but from a journalist's point of view this is why and there should be a new should be a new law against selling of data furthermore we need to exit mass mass surveillance and we need we need to have a check on secure secure services well it's incredible that two years after snowden they they think about you know just expanding it the other thing we want to say don't give up we carry on despite complete surveillance and everything else it's a bit it's a shame that the campaign ended ended so so quickly we had a lot of ideas but we happily accept documents and as a thank you for for the whole investigation we have we published the whole the strategy of the secret service has in terms of expanding surveillance that's the exterior secret service it's big complicated we were talking about the interior one most of the time and it furthermore thank you very much for helping us it helps really a lot to receive all the support i heard from other media other communities i don't think we would have survived it as as well well if you think our work is good then you can donate to us let's put it to the org slash spent spent or we have a few like cool t-shirts and hoodies and cool bags they're somewhere all right over there somewhere there are also stickers with hands going anyway thank you very much commit more treason and thank you have fun in the congress