 Hashtag C3T, you will now, and now we're going to move on to the content. I prepared something from Wikipedia, let's see if this is going to work out. The Information Freedom Act belongs to everyone. The right to access official documentations and information from offices. You do not need to give a reason for why you want to access that information. I thought you guys would be laughing right about now, but that didn't really work out. Oh well, I'm going to pass on the microphone to the people who know a little bit more about the Freedom of Information Act, the IFG in German that's Anne Semsrod, Rainer Rehaag, Andre Meister and Anna Biselli, who are going to do this talk now. Hello, hi everyone. I'm afraid we're going to have to talk about this democracy, about this democracy. Don't worry, I don't want to start the general usual democracy discussion that was done in the media, whether or not you should be talking to Nazis or whether you should invite them. No, you shouldn't, but you should talk more important questions with regards to democracy such as the question, how can you basically create a democracy that it benefits a lot of people and that it prevents racists and people from this conservative side. How can we invest in democracy? An important measurement of this is the Information Freedom Act, that on the country scale it gives everyone the right to access information from the state and all sorts of information. You can, for example, call the city of Tübingen and ask them what is the official ID of Boris Palma, who is the mayor of the sound of Tübingen and then you will get a response from him personally. So there's all sorts of stuff that you can, it's part of your civil rights, it's part of your right to participate in democracy, it's obviously related to creation of will and it obviously is supposed to be a way of controlling the state actions and obviously also fight corruption. And I think it shows quite well what's the central aspect of this IFG, the Freedom Act of Information. It's supposed to be a democracy infrastructure, so that's what cities for our streets, for the car system and infrastructure, that's what the Information Freedom Act is for democracy. So in this talk we would like to cover how the use of this democratic infrastructure can be sensible and useful, Reina, Andre and Anna are going to give us some examples of this and then afterwards we want to cover how this infrastructure can be built further. And so in the beginning we would like to do a view, what's the scale at the moment for the Information Freedom Act. So we see three different categories where we have counties that do not have any of these Freedom Acts and we have the counties that have that sort of act and then we have three counties that have transparency law. So where you don't have to file for an official inquiry, you actually have data that's provided by them. And this year the County of Hess has gotten an Information Freedom Act, hold your applause because when you look at this applause, the CDU and the FTP who are in charge in this county exempted all communal departments, the police which is in line with the police laws, because the police in Hess is not supposed to give any information. They're not, they're prevented, they're protected from this and this is like a mystification of the police and this kind of categorization that we used in the past doesn't really work anymore. So for Hess we need a new categorization which is what we like to call the so-called categorization of the Information Freedom Act. So they get their new category which is IFG in quotation marks. Otherwise there's a couple of things that were done but not in the speed that we like. In Berlin for example we have the coalition that up to this point still does not have an example for a transparency law in transparency act in Berlin. That's why we are starting, going to start to collect signatures and summaries for So basically we're trying to gather enough votes so that we can from the grounds get this pushed through further. So if we look at the European context we can see a bit more how special it is to not have any information Freedom Act. There's only White Russia, Austria and Bavaria who don't have it and Bavaria's Saxony and Lower Saxony are the only counties within Germany so they kind of align with White Russia. And there's something special about the infrastructure of democracy in comparison to other infrastructures. It's not kind of something that's getting worse by the time it's being used. It just gets better by it being used. So that's why we want to in detail want to give you three examples of how you can use this infrastructure and how you can strengthen it. Hello hello. Hello hello. All right. So my friendship with the Information Freedom Act is going back a few years now. I've never told this to anyone. But in 2011 I got a call from the Open Knowledge Foundation. You know about email. Can't you set up a mail server for us? We have this project. Ask the state, where you can ask for documentation from the state. We're going to ask the state and beg for documents. I don't know how convinced I am if this is going to work. But I did it. And I was quite happy and I have an account on this platform. And I use it quite frequently and I like it. And a lot of times it causes good results. Sometimes it doesn't. Generates no results. But if you use this platform, asking the state has gotten so easy. If you stumble across something, you can be like, oh, yeah, exactly. There's a document that's being mentioned. I can't find it. Just maybe file for a small inquiry and you just need to get it sent to you. So for a lot of things I have done this, especially for something like the state Trojan Horse is my most favorite subject of the politicians to make sure that security officers, police and such as can hack into machines and can access data and surveil this data. Here is a product video of the product finfisher from a German British company that was bought by the German criminal police department. And we asked for the contract. But this was officially first introduced to fight international terrorism. And it was to prevent these sort of strong laws, strong crimes. And the parliament decided, well, if we have this kind of software, we might as well use it for anything that is a severe criminality within everyday criminality. So our goal, obviously, is to get more transparency. So you bought the state Trojan Horse. Why don't you give us the contract? So they were like responding, no. All right. But we have this right based on the Freedom of Information Act. So we filed and sued them. And then we got the contract. And that is kind of what it looks like. It's kind of blacked out everywhere. But filing this complaint with a trial was very important. And I also asked the police to give us the contract. But then I was like, oh, I already sued you guys. And then I got it. And it looks exactly pretty much like this. The Freedom of Information Act is obviously not the only way to access information. There is also a way where you can ask parliamentarians because they can file inquiries and request other legislators. And they can ask questions that obviously you as a normal citizen can. So the Green Party asked a question to the government. Did you, on an academic, scientific standpoint, research whether or not you need the state Trojan? And in what cases you actually need it? But then they were like, no, it didn't really do that. But we kind of checked with BKAA, which is the German State Police Department. And they kind of looked into cases where that would have been kind of nice to have. So then we were like, oh, well, we would love to see that document that you were using to do that. And so we were like, oh, that's filed for that document. So then we had to wait, obviously, because usually they have a certain deadline where they have to give you the documents. And then they don't. And once you exceed that deadline, you can push another button, and then they will be reminded that they are supposed to send you this. And then you wait until day 50. And then I reminded them again. And then afterwards, we were obviously doing a lot more research and other work on the side. So the Freedom of Information Act is one way of getting information. As a journalist, you obviously have other means and ways of getting documents. You have stuff being sent to you. In between, we got like seven documents that were actually protected under security. And we got them sent to us. And my international, my inquiry via the Information and Freedom Act was up until 100 day and seven without anything. So I got in touch with a federal criminal police office again. You are exceeding the deadline that you were supposed to be sending me this information on. And I got also in touch with the department that's in charge of data protection and information freedom. And you can get in touch with them if you have trouble when an inquiry is not being dealt with. And then you can ask them and please look at my case. And what's it said? I said I am under the impression that this inquiry was dealt with because of unlawful things. And then obviously the next day we got a mail from the federal police department. And then they were like, oh, no, we didn't get your e-mail. But the funny thing is with ask the state, you can actually get, except from the mail log where it says you got the e-mail. So it said and stated that because we didn't get it, that's okay that you didn't get it. I can give you a link to where you can read my question that I sent in. And so I send you the link and you can look it up yourself. All right. And then you get your official response. There's the document that you asked for. And so we finally get the document that we asked for. And now we obviously have to analyze this. So what cases do we actually have where the security officers would want to use the State Trojan horse? So this reads as follows. Criminal acts as part of a criminal against four, like something like child pornography, more than killing. If you look at criminal acts followed by death. So we started with terrorism and then expanded it to this. But obviously these offenses are not actually mentioned in this file that we got. So half of the stuff that we saw in this document were related to drugs. And the other one were related to people stealing and robbing. So that was kind of what was kind of baffling for us. That they obviously want to use the State Trojan horse mainly against drug-related crime and stuff where, in cases where things were stolen. And I mean this was a hundred days of research. So if there's anybody else that surveillance measurements are only being used against terrorism and quite high crimes and strong crimes, this is what it's used against. So from getting from hemp to bump, which is the office for migration, now on to Anna. Oh, the microphone, yeah. Great. Andrea already said we're going to move to bump the Ministry for Migration and Refugees, which is my favorite German agency. And I think I also want to tell you about how you can create a personal relationship with institutions, which happens quite quickly if you continue to annoy them over the years. This started in 2015. That's when I asked the bump something for the first time. You may remember that's when a lot of people fled to Germany and I wanted to know, well, what happens if someone has a hearing for the first time? What do people ask them about? I don't even remember why I wanted to know this, but I also wanted to have the earlier versions of these questionnaires that they used. So that was 2015. And then I got a call two days later by someone who was employed at BAMF and who was probably responsible for these FOIA requests. He was like, Ms. Biselli, do you really want to see all versions? But that's a lot of work for me. Well, I guess, well, I already have some. Then maybe just send me the current one. And then it actually came a week later. I was enthusiastic. It was amazing. And it came in a digital version within a week. I thought that was fair. It was quite nice. That was my first request. Then I didn't request anything from BAMF for a while, but then it started again. That was when I started working in my journalistic work at the time I was primarily sending press requests rather than FOIA requests. It was quite interesting because you may think, oh, journalists are so privileged. They can ask these institutions or these things. But actually, in many cases, the Freedom of Information Act is actually something that's much more reliable. But it also depends on the specific institution you're interacting with. Let's just have a look at the Ministry of Defense, which I also have to deal with sometimes, because the Ministry of Defense is a really great institution to interact with because they have a lot of humor, because sometimes they send you something and then they're right on there by hand cyber information. I thought it was really nice that they wrote that on there by hand because then you get a letter from them and says cyber information from the Ministry of Defense. And maybe just another quick story. Anna and I had another episode with the German Army where Anna asked the army for a game that they created and they were like, oh, I can't really do that. There's something about IP problems, but you can come here and play it with us. So Anna and I actually went to the German Army's canteen and played this game with a press officer and some other guy. We basically unpacked it unboxing-wise, like on one of those YouTube videos. And then at some point they were like, well, you know, these FOIA requests, they're pretty annoying. Can't you just send press requests? Well, no. FOIA requests are something that everyone should be able to ask and we don't really like this whole thing about privileging the press. So in the case of the BAMF, you can also just send them press requests and I knew there was a guidance that they'd given out that there was something about a speech recognition and speech analysis in terms of people who were requesting asylum. I wasn't quite sure what that said and what was called, but I knew that it existed. So I asked for the title and asked them to send it to me. There was a press request. And they were like, no, that's only for internal use and not public. And then I was like, okay, guys, seriously, I've asked for other guidelines previously and you've given those to me, so I'll just send in a FOIA request. So I asked them in February 2018, said this is from 2017, and I got it around a week later and I got it as an HTML file because it sent out as an email, which was helpful because I could see who it was sent to. Which was interestingly not just sent to the regular BAMF employee mailing lists, but was also sent to the management consultancies that had advised the ministry to implement these systems. Very interesting. I've never seen anything like that. So that's zero to one for FOIA requests. You too should submit FOIA requests and not assume or wait for someone to report on it. My personal routine is me reading certain news and media kind of sites document that they allegedly have and I'm like, oh, well, it can't be that secret. I'm going to request this document and then I can tell them, well, actually this document which you're claiming is a secret, it's online now. So let's continue. I had to talk about this yesterday, how the ministry trains its employees to use all these IT systems for dialect analysis and smartphone analysis. In the very beginning, I was primarily interested in how this dialect analysis happens and works and I wanted to know how these people who make decisions, what kind of tools and information they get to interpret the output of these programs. So I told them, please give me everything. I don't want it just to be limited to specific types of documents. I just want everything. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. And then I actually got an answer. I got two internal guidelines. One was for asylum requests and how essentially the determined someone's identity and the guideline for the secretariat that basically said exactly the same thing. And I was like, well, that's not so cool because I don't really think that's everything. So maybe I need to phrase this in a different way. So they really sent me everything. So I phrased it slightly differently. Well, now there was a parliamentary inquiry into this. And now we know that you have these trainings for your employees that are between four and eight hours. And I basically assumed it would have been very weird if this was a government agency that doesn't create PowerPoints for its trainings. And so I basically asked for these documents. So I know about these things. Please send me exactly that. Please send me everything. Please send it to me about all these tools that you train people on. Similarly to Andre, I waited and was, okay, come on. Now it's really about time you need to send me something. And then there was this pseudo scandal that was happening with the ministry where the ministry bump was like, okay, our lawyers are currently quite busy. And I was like, okay, well, I can see that. And then four months later, I finally got an answer. And then basically said, we're sending the following documents, user manual training documents, and so on and so on. And that was August 2018. I was really happy. And then I continued to read and it said, well, you can't duplicate or publish these or give them to other people, which is kind of funny because this is the Freedom of Information Act because thousands of people can just ask for the same document and you can basically drive a DDoS attack on a ministry. And then they basically often say, oh, okay, now you can publish it. And I was like, okay, I'm just not going to start with that. The bump did something really nice. They basically wrote my PowerPoint slides for this Congress and so I'm just going to publish these slides. And well, you can have a look at that talk. But this is my favorite, favorite slide, which is, these are different types of phones that people might encounter, including the Nokia phone gun, which doesn't actually exist, but is a Photoshop. And then I looked at these documents a bit further and I asked myself, when did I request these documents? And you didn't even ask about user manuals. And I was like, okay, I put out this request in April and then you look at the dates here when these manuals were created. And this was in June 2018. Oh, that's so nice that even though, that they basically created documents that tell me how to use these systems even after I requested these documents. That's actually quite funny. You can now look at them on fragt-en-stat.de. And most of these are basically copy-paste. So I got these for several different softwares. And you can basically say this is version 1.0 because it basically tells you how to click things and doesn't really tell you how to actually use these tools. We saw in the beginning, BAMF answered within a week. Then suddenly it took them four weeks, which I guess is also okay, but then suddenly it started to take much, much longer for them to respond. And they started just sending everything on paper and telling me that I couldn't publish things anymore. And for my last request, they had an even funnier idea because I wanted to have their Dublin-related guideline. And they said, well, guidelines, we're going to include an IP clause and the Intellectual Property Protection Clause. And it's not like there are few guidelines that are not public. Another German NGO also published one a while ago. And there has never been an IP clause in there, but now they started putting in IP clauses and saying this is Intellectual Property, you can't publish this. I think this is an interesting example of how IP law is used to essentially try to prevent publication and to censorship. And then basically, if you look at the IP Protection Law, basically it says IP law, these things are not sufficiently creative, there is not a lot of creation happening here when it's basically a guideline from a government institution, and well, we're just going to publish this, which, well, it's our job, and I would highly recommend you do the same thing. And just to close with, another document that was quite important that I didn't ask, but Arne requested that, this document shows that the supposed BAMF scandal, which was a pretty big deal in German politics earlier this year, wasn't actually a scandal. So people said that the ministry essentially grabbed asylum cases which they weren't supposed to be responsible for, and that allegedly people got asylum who weren't supposed to get asylum. But by getting this document we found out that actually that's not quite what happened because basically people who were requesting asylum can be moved and distributed across different instances and then can be explicitly sent, and these people were explicitly sent to Bremen which was accused of having essentially taken these cases. For journalists I think that's also really important, you should see are there other documents and if they exist you should look at those and then if they exist you should, I think you should publish those because it shouldn't just be journalists who are allowed to interpret these documents but everyone should be able to read them and talk about them and interpret them. Moving from IP law and censorship, let's move to places affected by a lack of transparency. Hello? Hello? I'm speaking. Yes? There seems to be an audio issue right now. We can't hear the speaker terribly well. We have an audio angel coming to the stage. Oh, okay, nice, very nice. So we had places with audio issues. So I will tell you about places affected by a lack of transparency. There was one situation that happened in 2016, began in 2016. Sometimes these things take a bit longer which is about Riga Straße in Berlin. There were several conflicts between left-wing housing projects which are in these cases people who live there and pay rent and the police. There were several clearances that actually turned out to be illegal in it. And in this public area there, there was suddenly an immense amount of police control in these roads surrounding that area. What do you do if you don't understand what the state is doing? You submit a FOIA request via askthestate.de and you ask them, well, what's happening with this allegedly especially criminal area and what happens, what can the police do because you designate this area as especially criminal and then they tell us, well, okay, so the legal basis that they're basing this on is the general police law. I actually work there and so I've talked to people who have the experience of living there and basically the experience is that the police randomly stops people, checks their identity, searches their things, including their strollers, their cars and their bags. And my FOIA request was actually denied because I asked what is actually happening there and why are they allowed to do this, was just denied without any waiting period. The justification was quite interesting. For one, they said the right to actually have insight into document only exists. It doesn't exist if this could prevent what the government is doing there from succeeding and then it says that there is a severe threat to the general well-being and I was like, oh my God, what are they doing there that they can't tell me about this? And then a few weeks later you heard about from the media that they found weapons such as strollers and well, yeah, words are the biggest weapons, I guess. And the justification of the police continued. They couldn't respond to this FOIA request because otherwise they would have to admit that this area is an area that's specifically affected and saying that this area has a higher rate of criminality would make people feel less secure. And people were telling me basically we have police cars here, we have hundreds of police people coming here but you don't want to tell us on paper that we shouldn't feel safe in this area. So this whole feeling of insecurity that already exists which is also created because people aren't told what's happening there. So the next justification was a post-scriptum. The government's actions cannot be calculable or foreseeable. Okay. I don't know whether that was a conversation within that police itself because sometimes that's, yeah, on the left we know what this looks like but we were like, no, no, no, this isn't okay, we have to escalate. So we actually, with the aid of us, the state, we went to trial and submitted a FOIA suit and we sued the Berlin police and basically asked for them publishing these documents to finally tell us what actually is happening there because you can't always afford a suit. And we also asked for donations. Together there was another NGO called FIF and then we got another rejection from the police and then we basically gave our question to our lawyer including the justifications for the denials and our lawyer, his reaction was basically, he was saying well, there are severe possible consequences for the general well-being and our response was we just want to point out that the police Bremen also designates these dangerous areas and actually publishes the designated areas online where you can check online on their website where exactly, including the number of streets and when these areas are designated as dangerous and which parts of the population are considered dangerous. And so the way the public well-being is limited, if you publish this information, it can't be that bad if Bremen does it, but point two where they talked about how government's actions cannot be calculable or foreseeable and our lawyer's response was basically, well, we're kind of astonished at this where the people we're suing is essentially saying that a state's action cannot be foreseeable. They should maybe have a look at a general comment on Article 20 of the Basic Law, which basically says exactly the opposite. The Basic Law is the German Constitution. I'm just going to translate this into non-lawyer German. One does not simply ignore a general comment on Article 20 of the German Basic Law. Fun fact, just on the side. So we sued the police while policemen and police women were basically complaining that they were being abused for an election campaign because they also didn't want to be there. So maybe sometimes you're actually on the same side as the police. And then mid-2017, there was an oral hearing. They answered four of our five questions, which included how areas were designated and the justification, but that wasn't five out of five, so we didn't quite win. So basically, they said, well, one and a half years later, we can tell you, this area is specifically dangerous area with a high rate of criminality. And we're like, oh, really? Thanks. Well, I guess at least you're being honest. But then finally, the extent, like how big this area was, that was something that was missing. And then we actually had these really weird scenes in this hearing. We were like, well, why can't you just tell us the exact extent of this area? You just tell us until which road, which street it goes. Ah, but all these criminals, if they knew where that line is, they would just move 30 centimeters and then they will commit crimes there and then we can't control them. Okay. Well, so I was thinking of this Simpsons scene. And this other point was, this was about, it was specifically about a housing project in Riga Straße. And there was like, how do you move crimes that happen around a housing project, which is static? Well, so a result for now, at that point was that there was a structural improvement. That was obviously not just because of us. There were other people who were working on this and other people asking for this information. But the red-green coalition in Berlin actually changed the guidelines. The data's a bit confusing. This was after our hearing. And they basically said, well, yeah, these areas designated as having a high rate of criminality in these areas, all of this will be published live now and will be published online. So there are actually structural changes and this information is now available freely online. That's pretty cool. We also had media coverage about this before. And now we are appealing this decision and this appeal is ongoing. And as started in 2016 and it's ongoing as of 2019. And so we want to thank our lawyer. We want to thank us, the state, Julian Kruger, Marco Mitter, Paul Geigerzähler and the people who helped us with their donations to actually enable this whole thing to happen. Related to this, there's two aspects that I would like to stress on. One, the information is interesting that you gain, but also the information that you don't get. One example for this is the Afghanistan state of relations right now. We asked for that with the Defense Department and we wanted to, we asked for this and we got it back and it looked a bit like this and it looked like that. And I think that that's quite telling. This blackout is showing very well what the current state of human rights and security is in Afghanistan. I think an interesting detail on this report is that the security report in 2007 was supposed to be done in 2007 because of a terroristic attack on the German embassy but it could only be finished in 2018. So if you will talk about deportations to Afghanistan right today, this is inhumane politics that you're doing. The second aspect that is quite interesting to me is that the Information and Freedom Act doesn't make you get information but you also get copies of original files. I have a good example for this. There is a copy from the Foreign Ministry about the refugee situation in Libya that writes that there is a refugee camp that's similar to former concentration camps and that as a quote is quite impressive. But when you see the document with the logo from the Foreign Affairs, from an office affair and this sentence where it says that it's similar to concentration camps and you really know how far down the line we are. So this is how you can use these democratic infrastructures and how you can further use this and build it up. And this is obviously not just by the Information and Freedom Act. There's the ecosystem. There's other laws that are related to it. There's obviously also this law that was introduced in 1933 by the Nazis that today is a paragraph 2019 and this is about Freedom of Information on Abortions. The Nazis introduced the paragraph 219A in May 1933 and for the criminal law book I think what should count that today is that Nazis out and they should also be out of our law books and that's why this law should be abolished. The Information Freedom Act is going to be changed soon. There's a response to an inquiry filed. We don't yet know what's going to be changed but it's going to be changed. I don't know because I'm retiring tomorrow. Correlation, not causality. So we don't know what's going to happen but this law is probably going to be more restrictive by the current inner ministry. But independently from this we want to look at how we can further build this and so we still started a campaign where we wanted all lobby statements so the fast process of making law that should be made public and we went to talk the ministries and started with and we were like, why don't you publicize and they were like, well thank you and didn't do anything so that's why we did, why don't we start something new so we wanted to do something so we built a database with 17,000 documents with different statements by lobbyists and people who were holding speeches so we made that public so why don't we make all these documents accessible and within a week we got 2,000 requests and send them to the government. And it showed it is super effective and the ministries took 3 weeks and then published all these documents themselves. There was no decision yet however how this was going to be done and dealt with in the future, this was a decision for past decisions so this year we went up to them again why don't you publish these documents because otherwise we'll start this campaign again so in November the ministries decided that they will publish all speaker files and lobby statements We were kind of intrigued by this playful attitude towards this so we were like how can we get the ministries more to our side more to overture ourselves so then we started this championship of information of freedom act and the principle here is that we are taking an inquiry for all the different departments and whoever answers first gets a round further ahead and that was super interesting that was a super interesting game to watch like this competition was super interesting like all the different matchups this one was quite interesting the foreign ministry bet the BMZ and I think was the first time where the SPD could beat the CDU and we tweeted on about this life and we tried to kind of draw in the ministries and all of them responded, it was super interesting there was a ministry that within a day they responded to us so they really took well to our playful attitude towards this so we tweeted that and we're really excited a day after Hosehova reached the semifinals and Hosehova responded with a GIF and in round two I think there was one ministry that called me and they called me and we're like did you get it did we get one further, did we get a round further ahead it was brilliant and then we did a trailer for the finale because we wanted to show this but I think the gamer is somewhere in the room and we can't play this music because otherwise we'll have to pay a fine so that's why we're doing the music live for you now because then it's just prevented from us having to pay gamer and gamer needs to die so that we can finally stream this and you don't have to listen to us humming are you ready? there is big applause from the audience for this beautiful performance Stefan Wehrmeier joined Aina on stage he is the founder and developer for Faktenstadt the website where you can file your own fire requests who won Anja Kalicek won so did she get a trophy for this, for winning yes of course she got a trophy the trophy looked something like this alright so the most interesting aspect of the story is that how these ministries in social media were acting especially the Ministry of the Interior that was all happening at the same time to the master plan of migration to this affair for many times we tried to request this but we leaked that there was the CDU version and the BMI version and we were like do they have something to do with one another we don't really know so the Ministry of the Interior was quite under fire for this of course you kind of created this inhumane document alright let's do something great new on social media so we created this new hashtag called Ask the Minister so all people could send a tweet to the Minister of the Interior and he answers them personally and the question most asked was this one how do you want to respond to this question and then the response was this is a question that we don't really ask so this has nothing to do with freedom of information so we're going to look at this a bit closer and we're like what are they doing on Twitter a lot more what they do quite often is they ask users if they could send them a direct message to DM so we're like let's get the DMs brilliant we can ask for emails we can ask for DMs so the Ministry of the Interior said no so we're like new hashtag Sue the Minister so we filed a suit against the Ministry of the Interior and I think this inquiry this request and the suit that we brought about was very interesting it's not just about the general about private platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp groups should be accessible for now the focus is very much towards the physical file and it's obviously not very contemporary anymore and the suit so far has this correspondence does not have to be filed with the same kind of carefulness and you can see quite well what their attitude towards it is you don't really have to file your you don't have to do any more diligence for the kind of conversations that happen on these private platforms so the most German thing that exists is that German offices from acts from Germans abroad and in the state file due diligence sorry guys so I mean obviously we hope that in the next year that there's going to be a trial and there's a few suits that we brought to the end we had the Parliament of Rheinland-Pfalz that did not want to hand over files for us from all sorts of parties were fighting that and we won and we won in the first instance in the second and for two months ago we got these reports and the head of the parliament said well if these reports are published obviously there's going to be pressure to justify and then we have to justify in the public why we have done and come to certain conclusions obviously that would be horrible if that would take place but all these reports are now public and we also won another suit with the Federal Council because you could only in the official documents how counties and how elections came about you couldn't see who decided for what so we then asked all the counties to publicize how they came to a decision and so we went to Sachsen-Anhalt and asked for the last meeting and the meeting before that and we would always get their reports and how these things were made and you can obviously do the same there is still a phone that you can donate to which is called Transparency Suits Transparenzklagen.de there are a couple of suits that so far have not had their official trial yet because everybody is completely over-exhausted and that's why all of these things are taking so long and that's I think why this is really important why, who has to sue more and I think that's the public offices that have to sue more because we looked at how many suits they brought about and if asked the state sues more than the public broadcasting systems of Germany then something is going very wrong and with that I would like to come to the conclusion that's called Living Democracy and it's called like that because there is a program done by the country of Germany it's called Living Democracy there's a hundred million euros that is supposed to give money to support democracy infrastructure we've worked quite a few things and published a few things that are related to this and it states that every state the inappropriate usage of public provisions doesn't only have to be effectively excluded and prevented but the ministries basically also are allowed to look into this and these different ministries use this quite a lot they actually there were 51 organizations which they passed on to the German secret service to have them check whether these organizations deserve a democracy a democracy seal of approval essentially so basically in this case the secret service in this case the federal office for the protection of the institution the Verfassungsschutz is who gets to decide who is democratic and you may remember this person Christina Schröder, former minister of families was actually interested in an extremism class where we wanted everyone who for example adopts kids to sign a non-extremism class and that was something that we got rid of because so many civil society organizations opposed this what did the ministry of families do in response to that then they were like oh well now we're going to try it with this guy Hans Georg Maasen and his friends with the AFD ultimately decided within the Verfassungsschutz whether they basically decided whether an organization could get this seal of approval or not we wanted to know more about this and they were like well this is a secret service so it's secret so we don't even know how this so-called office for the protection of the constitution actually decides whether an organization gets this seal of approval they just get a yes or no they give that to the ministry of families and there's basically a black box we don't know how these decisions are made so we approached the ministry again and basically asked for the names of those 51 organizations they refused, they rejected the request and I was invited into the ministry of families to the person who was in charge of the relevant section of the ministry and he was like please distance yourself from this request because it wouldn't be good for anyone involved in this if this came out I was like oh that sounds interesting so we sued because we want to know the names of these 51 organizations and then the response to this suit we got that five days ago if you read that that's extremely remarkable it was written by an external legal law law firm so basically the ministry used tax money to pay this external law firm to write this justification they argue that essentially if these organizations' names are published then public security will be endangered why? because then fewer organizations will be will send in requests to the ministry of families and this is their response if we publish these organizations' names then other people who want to implement projects might also be mistrustful of the ministry the basis for a trust-based corporation could be destroyed doing this so they're basically saying the ministry says if it comes out what do we actually do then you can't trust us anymore I think that's extremely remarkable that they don't even deny that this is extremely problematic to work with a secret service but rather than drawing relevant consequences and saying we don't want to do this anymore they're just saying we'll just keep it secret I think if that's their idea of democracy that the ministry of families has here we need to maybe teach them what it means to actually live democracy and that's we're going to get to our concluding section with that we have a pretty big backlog of investment I think that's what you call these things when you talk about, for example, internet infrastructure I just don't mean this just in a financial way but also in a practical way because the democracy infrastructure gets better when you use it so if you ask, if you sue, this infrastructure improves we can do that together and with that thank you very much we have eight minutes for questions and answers if you have questions, go find a microphone we're going to try to get as many questions as possible number two, you can get the first one thank you I'm just going to give you a talking talk thank you so much for the talk it's super enlightening, you're doing brilliant work Anna, I have a good question you have the slide, how many other suits you have currently going on and there's a company that is in mining industry, there's a mining industry suit that's the LMBV that's the LMBV company which we're suing which is responsible for mining after restructuring and restoration so they restore areas in the Lausitz part of Germany and we suit them because they said we don't actually have to tell you anything but we're saying this is basically a company that's 100% state owned so at least based on the pre-information act they actually obliged to give us information as well and that's one of those basic basic principle suits because we basically want to make sure that we have written down by court that these institutions also need to answer our requests we're going to start with the internet and then afterwards the aid one question is, are there cases where FOIA requests caused for repercussions? paying money is a repercussion, right? it's pretty expensive well, I think that's a good point what's important to us is that you can send in requests anonymously as well and that's a really big point of discussion that we've had for the past few years especially with the Ministry of the Interior we think that if you don't want a government agency to know your name you should be able to use a pseudonym to put in a FOIA request the Ministry of the Interior disagrees with that and there was one case by Jan Kutziak he's a Slovak journalist who was killed because of a FOIA request he and his fiancé what happened was that he sent a FOIA request to a Slovak agency based on their Freedom of Information Act and basically included his name and his address and that was about this whole request was about organized crime what did the Ministry do it sent it to the people who were affected by this by organized crime and they were like well can we tell them their name by the way, this is the request and that's how his name and his address came out and that's probably why he was killed and murdered and that's why it's really important to us that the people who don't want to submit a FOIA request under their own name you can find someone who makes that request for them such as us but they should also be able to do it pseudonymously no microphone number my question is super similar you are kind of joking about this but how expensive are these FOIA requests like for example for the competition oh for example for this competition the requests all of them were free but in general agencies are allowed to ask for up to 500 euros of fees especially for large requests they usually do that to scare you away but you can usually kind of like negotiate that down maybe even down to zero euros what's even more expensive are lawsuits which is why we have this pot where we collect donations for lawsuits for example there was one case in Rheinland-Pfalz where we paid 3000 euros although we won and the four please number four please thank you thank you so much for the heroic work we're doing I have a question at this active compliance kind of from ministries and offices and they just kind of refuse to answer on these grounds do you want to say something about that sometimes I'm not sure whether some of us don't get information more quickly because government agencies know that we're going to sue them I think it can be helpful to have some kind of reputation with government agencies but we also know that although it's not allowed they also talk and exchange information between agencies despite this actually not being allowed I actually got a response from a ministry of agriculture to that I sent to the ministry of health because they internally passed that on but we also have this general standard sentence in our requests we we don't want our names to be essentially passed on thank you so much for the talk I'm especially living in a country where we don't have information of freedom act do you know what the state of things is Bavaria Saxony lower Saxony so in Bavaria they're saying lower Saxony they're saying that they want to have a freedom of information act as part of the coalition but the conservative party is not sufficiently interested in it so I think it might make sense to remind the social democratic party in lower Saxony new government they have no interest in implementing such a law their coalition agreement basically says they want to evaluate how this worked in other federal states and in Bavaria the free voters essentially said that they want to implement the freedom of information law but it wasn't they didn't they didn't manage to convince the conservative party there in a coalition with to put that into the coalition agreement so based on that I think the landscape of freedom of information acts will look similar to this year alright question from the internet how is it with companies that 100% owned by the states such as the German train company not for the freedom of information act but the environmental information law because when we're dealing with the environment which is a pretty broad term everything is kind of loud and stinky then the environmental information law applies and then companies that are owned by the the German state might be affected which includes for example the German train company so I think once you're affected by this particular law that's the case alright that's the last question for this talk and this comes from number three I would like to know how you mentioned the first draft for the law that you want to publish from ministries and I would like to know if this is a guidance of law that is something that can be taken aback from the next governmental body or is there something that we can implement as something that makes sure that transparency is kept alive that's a great question there was a cabinet decision and that's how do you say this usually these decisions from within the cabinet are implemented further even beyond that particular legislative period and I think it's a good sign that it was done in the beginning of the legislative period I think once you finally have a standard and a baseline of transparency then it's very difficult to go back below that standard but what doesn't happen is that they put these things into the general operational standing orders of the German government and that was best of Informationsfreiheit or best of Freedom of Information and Arne Semsrott