 We just have half an hour. So thank you, thank you. André, that's Marcos. You can look it up. Maybe you can eyes us. So we're doing this thing, NetsPolitik, with a lot of volunteers as well. And we're here to tell you a story that started more than, yeah, over a year ago. But only really in the last month, in the last two weeks really got explosive. So we've been active for 11 years now. But it's just in the last couple of years that we've been leaking documents, maybe from the BND, the German Nachrichtendienst, the state trojan that was publicly developed. So basically, the chancellor's office, we had all sorts of, well, bigger enemies. And now we have got this letter signed by several authorities. And what we did, of course, was just to publish the entire letter on our website. Spiegel newspaper was working on it. Well, and Merco was involved. And just the reference to press freedom, it wouldn't be that easy to proceed in such a way with media, we thought. Well, but at least in so far that hasn't stopped us carrying on our work. But let's just jump back to February a few months ago. Well, what we found was information on how the German, it's not a secret service as such. It's the Interior Secret Service. The Interior Secret Service, but for the protection of the Constitution, so-called. And this was information of broad monitoring programs. And these drafts and internal memos, they were talking about we need more money and more personnel for just to manage the amount of data that we're processing. And this was something about the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. These documents that was addressed in Bundestag, in parliament, by several representatives. And these internal structures that are targeted, or specifically for information surveillance, for internet surveillance, they've been exposed in that sense as structures within this service. The way they deal with data, the way they filter them, they have a whole unit for that. Communication, graph analysis, movement profile analysis for their spies. So the things that we have been warning about for years and years connected to data retention, and everyone was saying, well, this just can only be done for single people. But then it turns out, no, they spent a lot of money and a lot of jobs. More than we have journalists are working on this. We published this in English as well. No one seemed interested. But at the same time, we published this data retention. In Germany, it was reintroduced by the German Justice Minister. Interest still was low, and we were a bit disappointed about that. We published it at 10 past 9, tweeted it. And 10, 15 minutes later, Mars Justice Minister tweeted about his new proposals for data retention. So our article was below the radar. That's what we thought, but no, that wasn't the case at all. In early July, on a Saturday morning, I woke up and found on Twitter that German station, Deutschland von Gräde station, had an article. And I clicked on it, and that contained the message. The president of the Interior Service had reported to criminal offense about leaks. And I was thinking that could be our article. I looked it up in our own blog and thought, yeah, that's about us. We thought it was about us, and we thought it was about disclosing internal secrets, professional secrets. And this was against the sources, our sources, that had given us materials from inside the Interior Secret Service. This was written by someone called Rolf Kliemann. An interesting person. You could say he is an embedded speaker of the Interior Secret Service within the station, Deutschland von Gräde. This is his weak Wikipedia page. Just by coincidence, the last symposium by the Interior Secret Service was moderated by him, the one where Mars and the president said, this is a scandal. Someone wants to wreck the Interior Secret Service. So Kliemann seems to have made himself a tool, let himself make a tool, and leaked that there was going to be a criminal report and added that this was nothing to worry about. Press freedom would not be impeded because it was just against the sources, nonsense. Now, we published this, too, and there was a lot of criticism against us for publishing it. And people, this was, we were kicking up a storm about this, using it for our purposes, for our propaganda. And of course, now that we've learned a lot of law, the Federal Prosecutor is not even responsible for disclosing Interior secrets, professional secrets. But if press freedom is affected, this will be a case for the German Federal Prosecutor, who is kind of the legal arm of the government, normally only supposed to be investigating terror and espionage, and of course, serious trees and cases. So that made us think that it's not just about our sources and their internal secrets, their professional disclosures. We were talking to journalists who thought this is a scandal, but there was nothing tangible except this one report in Deutschlandfunk from Bayer-Rolf Kleement. So this is why this message made the rounds in our immediate surroundings, but didn't have such an impact as the latest revelations, the latest events had. So the Federal Prosecutor's jobs doesn't really include investigating journalists. So you could smell that something was going on, and we tried to investigate, we tried to find out what was going on, didn't get very far. And then on the 30th of July, it was at lunchtime, we had this formal letter accusing us of treason. We opened this and, well, first we went, what the fuck is treason? We had to find out what the actual charge was. And then we thought, well, challenge accepted. And then, of course, we blocked it and then looked up what treason, what the charge actually contains, what they would actually be charging us with, what the crime was. So this was about at least one year of prison. It could actually be life imprisonment in serious cases. And your mother called having read in tele-text that there could be a life imprisonment. Yeah, we told her not to worry that much. And then the phones went wild, and we had media inquiries after media inquiries and couldn't do anything else. But fortunately, quite soon, we had a lot of support from our surroundings, from our friends who came around with beer, some of them actually with champagne. We were there until midnight devising strategies and trying to find out what this actually came from, what's the historical background for this crime. It happened twice as a kind of award by the government to journalists in 1962, the very famous Spiegel affair. And then in 83, fairly unknown case against Concrete, a left-wing magazine. It used to be more well-known than it is today. They were telling stories about the military's wicked service. But Erich Kestner has written about it because Landesverrat, high treason, is the charge used by the Nazis to put people in concentration camps, comes from Prussian history and kind of lingers on in today's German law. And we weren't actually aware that it could be used against us because there has to be intent in order to commit treason, intent to threaten, seriously threaten the state. And we are not terrorists, we are not lawyers, we're not, we're just journalists. So we didn't look this up. We just pressed submits if we find something if we get leaked. So we were, we had investigated things so carefully beforehand, the legal implications. And so we would have to go via our lawyer and our admin and because it turned out that our block wasn't as available for a while as we would like it to be. And we really weren't prepared for the huge onslaught of attention that we had. Three or four times the volume that we have in what, a month, doing a single day, that was Twitter communication and quite absurdly we had this award, Germany, country of ideas. That was just a few days after we had been given this award and so we could take this photo. Marcus is holding the award about country of ideas and Andrea is holding the charge of the government, charging the awarded place of ideas. So that was the interesting mood that we were in at the time. So there was a kind of hatred love that we were feeling from the government. But finally we knew that someone was actually reading our articles before those charges. We thought that no one was interested in the way we would want them to be. So we've reserved this domain, landesferrattreason.org, with some information what that actually means. Someone kindly set this up for us. Other media mirrored our material, a collective research group said they were mirroring it and even built sighting the well-known tabloid. Normally on the conservative side, they mirrored it. And some others just linked to our website. So we had this absurd situation that people wanted to talk to us. We didn't have a legal department. We're thinking two years prison. It could be on the cards. So we need lawyers. We need money for them. So there was a huge funding, at least we could Twitter screenshots from the archive telling about, because we had media teams in the office. We wanted to give them some background and some screenshots. And we were able to make our international bank account number a trending hashtag on Twitter. Even our own bank itself Twittered that account number. And we said, this is probably the most well-known bank account number in the world. Unfortunately, they didn't waive the charges, the account fees. And then the next day it started, we had never been victim or part of caricatures, some of just a few of the many that were published. We were kind of sad that extra three, how to show the large news hatha shows were on holiday. But we've had some coverage. We had planned Andre and I to spend a weekend somewhere in the nature, somewhere in the world. But someone actually organized a demo. And with that, I was, shit, we wanted just some time off. It's not really convenient, the whole treason thing. And now they even want to do a demo and we can't get out of that. And we were worrying, will we be standing there with about 40 people in the heat and no one will be interested. But fortunately, things turned out different. People around us, in our surroundings, organized a demo. Thank you so much to all of you. And we are coming to that. We are coming to the demo later. So while we were sitting in the office drinking beer, the whole time answering media queries from throughout the world, people were sitting and setting up the domain landisferrat.org, organizing the demo, organizing campaigns. So that was super, super. And we were busy making screenshots from the sites that were reporting about us. We were top news in the national media, national broadcaster, website, tagashall.de. Friday night, our server was kind of back. And then again, another local news show, national news show that is, Haute Genard. They were making an exception and blogging our URL, which they normally don't do. So thank you. Next time, we'll be better prepared because the server was down, of course. So we had all these media people in the office. This is what treasonous look like. The gesture is known from the chancellor, Angela Merkel, if you don't know. So that was the demonstration. Franz Josef Strauss, minister implied in the Spiegelaffaire. So we thought no more beaches, no one's going to go there. We're going to go see the Fafaçon-Schutz. But we picked the nicest route through the middle of Berlin. And it was pretty full. 2,000 people, quote, treason, air quote. So reported inside online. So thanks a lot to everyone who was there. But there were several other decentralized actions with small demos in Munich and all over the place. We had street art, make land for war. And it was carried on, of course, online, the equivalent, netspolitik.us, statements in various languages in Turkish and Catalan. Asking for the charges to be dropped. Many, many people supported us and really inspired us. My whole Twitter timeline signed. Thank you. The whole thing went around the world. This is in Nepal, the newspaper, the Himalayan. Then there's a Greek media outlet. We were talking about people from France, Spain, wherever. And they were all completely flashed. We were so flashed that we were in all these worldwide media. A whole new component was introduced here. The attack on us was actually foreign policy damage to Germany. The Organization for Cooperation in Europe was complaining. So all around this weekend, Master Justice Minister went through the cameras and said to the federal prosecutor, you can't do it this way. In such a public way to just censoring journalists this way. Germany in a list of press freedom is currently on rank number 12. And we were then, there were statements made asking whether this could be kept, if this could, shouldn't be changed. And there's some real damage to Germany's reputation. And it's in the way that press freedom is handled in this country. And then we thought, OK, this is over. But Justice Minister has told the Federal Prosecutor to suspend the investigations. We thought there's no further interest. And we took it sometime off. And then suddenly the whole government seems to have been implicated. It was everyone against everyone. There was a whole conflict that someone's lying. Someone said people were just pointing fingers at each other. And no one wanted to be responsible. Who was actually the one that had raised these charges? And so here we have the Federal Prosecutor. And certainly he was gone. Who could have thought that? Not our fault. He was told to take early retirement. So again, there's the question the Interior Minister said on Friday, we didn't know anything. State Secretary Emily Harbour, he had a picture next to our Interior Minister, Mersier, said we didn't know anything to target the major German news broadcaster, news program. So the State Secretary said, OK, Interior Minister's Speaker said, well, we have talked to a few people and no one knew anything. Wednesday it turned out that wasn't quite true. Several departments within the Interior Ministry did know about the investigations because the criminal police office had reported. And it became so absurd that the Interior Ministry's defense strategy was to tell the press, well, we have some chaotic state of things. Sorry. Yes, that's the way it is. Against, towards some newspapers and broadcasters they said the State Secretary was informed but was instructed not to say anything. So the message was, sorry, we don't have, we don't really have things in order in our shop. That's strange, isn't it? So more questions were raised. We did this, we got this award about country of ideas. The German president, Johann Gaag, was the one who had given us this award. That was quite funny. So Johann Gaag's signature, the same day that he had signed the letter confirming the dismissal of the state federal prosecutor, the general federal prosecutor. So we had known that this date was on for quite a while. It was going to be the 5th of August for a long time. And now there was this funny coincidence that Targa Schauer, the major news program, began with this news. And meanwhile, here we have Johann Ulf, parliamentarian, very radical when it comes to pro-surveillance statements. So let's come to the open questions. So what's the remain, what is there that remains in terms of political responsibility or the interior ministry says it was the justice and the other way around? And it's all, well, they told us it's a state secret and all this back and forth that leaves us with a lot of open questions. And we made a sort of timeline to display, well, which quite displays the process more or less nicely, but I think there are still a few points to sort out and that will at least go to the legal committee in the Bundestag, in the German parliament, where we're not exactly upset that Range, the preceptor was made, was forced to take his leave or sacked. But the necessity to proceed in that way, well, there is so much disagreement on that that we want to know what information was available and in which points where. And Herr Müller, well, obviously in the office, everyone is called Müller, but we would like to know who was the person influencing the prosecutor who was maybe already observing us and we had documents that were already secret, but those were different documents than the ones that we were attacked for now in this form for publishing them. We've published them more confidential. The notes saying that we would be prosecuted was actually more secret than what we published. So we're trying to get hold of this document that was made in advance to evaluate us, but well, we'll see how we proceed. And we do want to know about surveillance that was maybe already in place. Well, the first explanation was don't worry, there aren't executive means being, well, nothing concrete like arrests or a house, a search in your house. But maybe Monday it sounded like it could just go on the next week. So we were in sort of waiting position, maybe anticipating the whole range of weaponry, but we know the people here from Congress from years, the tinfoil hats have always been encrypting everything. And we are quite conscious of this, so our office is maybe, well, we're not sure, we're not sure what kind of mobile surveillance, actual physical surveillance in front of our office. We don't know. This could be the Bonus Nachrichten Deans, the Secret Service, or maybe even police. But if you do know something, well, you can let us know over anonymous means. And so we'd like to see the files. But it's, we are entitled to see them at some point, but it seems to be a classic strategy of just keeping you waiting. For Fassong Schutz, we'll have to wait and discuss the level of secrecy. And it just takes a few weeks to see what what's confidential and to enforce that right, to just see the things that we are allowed to see. And one success is that's great that the charges, at least against us too, as persons, they were recently lifted just several days afterwards. And this is an important signal, I think, because a whistleblower, we couldn't, we wouldn't have that kind of information. We wouldn't have an inquiry into the BND, NSA affair in our parliament. We, it's the other way around. We should protect whistleblowers more instead of criminalizing the ones involved in obviously publishing this document. So data retention, we are clearly opposed to that, obviously, and that's all about the small print. The paragraph of data trading, basically, or illegitimate trading. This is included in these legal changes, and so we include this sort of sub-paragraph in our claim against and clear position against data retention. So it's not about like, I have a talk and what's the topic of it, but it's being misdirected from the contents of the publications itself to the legal proceedings, and that's problematic from a press point of view as well. Yeah. So civilians on a mass scale without suspicion has to be, has to go. In all these inquiry commissions, that's becoming a much broader topic, I think. It's not just for exactly these tinfoil hats from the Congress who knew it all along, but it's, well, especially these secret services developing a kind of life of their own without means of control. We are sort of internally divided in our editing office where we are sort of pro-eliminate secret services altogether, but the way that is the police collaboration, for instance, in... There are so many problems attached to this that maybe the tendency is to go and say they can... We want to abolish the interiors of the service. The institution of parliament has to be strengthened and improved. It has to stop being just a simulation of democracy, but if these three institutions of the legislative, the judicative and the executive can't manage this, then we can report on it. Do you have these t-shirts? So it says an abyss of treason. We got these t-shirts on time, a small addition only. We would sell them against the donation. These 15 Euros please outside at the Digital Courage stand. Somewhere next to the Digital Courage stand. Just next to our tent here where we're talking right now. We have stickers for your notebooks or you can use them anywhere outside this area. It's not a great... We are funded by donations. We are celebrating our 11th birthday, which was actually last Tuesday. That was the first log-posting. And there'll be a small conference on the 4th of September about that. What we would like to say is, all this is part of a very elaborate fight that we have to fight against suspicious surveillance. Never give up. Thanks a lot. It's not just us. Let's not make hears of us. We want you to join us. We need you all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Get your documents, Jets. I want to give the name to you. Thank you. I'm sorry. Thanks for listening to what you think as well. So, that's Jen. Amen. And give us feedback. Thank you very much. Have you got a hashtag? Did we define one earlier? Sure. Spread the news, if you listen to us. I'm giving a applause to Markus Beckerdahl and André Meister on stage. If you're non-German speaking and you've listened to this, we'd like you to tell your friends that you can follow German talks, because we don't know how to reach you if you're English and don't come to these talks and don't hear from the stage that we are translating. This is so fun. So much fun. Okay, get off the stage. T-shirts and stickers outside somewhere. And we'll be around for the next few days. Just talk to us.