 Right. When I wondered how to present this talk, I thought I might just tell you an anecdote from my life, how it all started, that I cared about net politics and data protection privacy. And this was due to a self-sprayed Darcy 2.0 T-shirt. But then I started doing my homework, preparing for this talk, and I googled Anna Zemsrott. Maybe I should have known more about him in advance, but the third hit was a Spiegel online article, and I quote, Anna Zemsrott improves the world. And I have to add that little Anna was 19 at the time, and I was quite impressed. By now, he's a political scientist and a freelance journalist for NetsPolitik.org, and he works for the Open Knowledge Foundation. You can find him at the infodesk. He leads projects on Fragt den Staat, and he has a very long list on projects on freedom of information, lobbyism, transparency, and we are very happy to have him here to tell us about how the government is. Thank you. Yes, I'm not going to say anything about the Spiegel online article. Open Feuer. We are in the big year of freedom of information. This year is a very important year for freedom of information, and the freedom of information laws that exist in the world are all revolutionary. I just made this slide because I wanted to stand in front of the word revolution at some point. These laws are revolutionary because freedom of information laws change the default setting of officers. Of authorities. The default case was not opening up any information at all, and freedom of information laws change, turn this default on its head, and say that all information that the state has has to be given to the public, unless there's a special interest to protect them, and the Swedish freedom of information law, the Offentli Kärtsprinzipan, has turned 250 years this year. The second oldest, the freedom of information act of Feuer has turned 50. The German freedom of information law turned 10. Ask the state, turn five, and Baden-Württemberg's freedom of information law turned one, so 249 years after the first freedom of information law, Baden-Württemberg got one of its own, and it's the worst of all German states. However, there are four more German states that don't have any freedom of information law at all. Those are lower Saxony, Saxony-Hess, and of course Bavaria, and those four states don't have any freedom of information laws. I just copied the map from last year. Lower Saxony has, well, they all have various governments, I forgot Bavaria's, and next year is going to be very important for the freedom of information. This is due to this state. I made this animation myself. That's Thuringia, and Thuringia will not only get its own freedom of information act, but it would also get transparency law, and that's quite important because Hamburg has one of these, and it means that you don't have to request information, but central data will be, you know, important data will be proactively published in a central register, and there's another reason why this is decisive, because it will decide whether or not one of the Germans, the constitution protection, so one of the intelligence agencies will have to publish their data, and so yes, the discussion is whether or not the Verfassungsschutz, the constitutional protection will have to publish their data, and this is going to be one of the crucial files of next year, so will they have to publish their data or not, but let's start with some successes. We had these two, that's Friedrich Springer, the most, and Joachim Zauer, one of the Friedrich Springer is the most powerful publisher, and Zauer is Angela Merkel's husband, and they not only have friendly relations, but also financial relations, because Friedrich Springer wired quite a lot of money to the Merkels, and because we looked at her foundation, and we got them through a freedom of information request, and all the members of the Curators' Committee get a very large salary, they meet twice a year for a couple of hours, they decide on a couple of projects, and they get 10,000 Euros in return. How did we request this? The Friedrich Springer Foundation is a private foundation, yes it is, but it has to send its Satzung to the Senate, and that's how you can get the document. This here is just a scan, but it's the main report on the German Development Fund for Rwanda, and you can see how the Germans knew about the Rwandan genocide before it happened, and it's a very interesting report, it's more than 130 pages, it's on Fakten Stadti, and this report shows that Germans knew about the genocide before it happened, the authorities knew that told the German Embassy that massacres were about to happen, and the German Embassy looked away, and some party foundations, some foundations of German parties trained journalists before this genocide who worked for the RTLM radio, which is the radio station that gave away the positions of victims so that they could be killed, and I think this report is also important today because Germany is still cooperating with regimes like in Sudan, as currently a project running in Sudan with the president of Sudan that tries to prevent refugees from entering the European Union, and of course the question is what happened to our never-again promises, but this report is interesting for another reason, which is because it turned 18, and it was only published this year by us, and it shows very well what the problem with freedom of information is in Germany. Many journalists already had this report, many organizations already had it, but none of them published it, they might have quoted it, they might have used it for their internal work, but it was just leaked to them, or they relied on the fact that the ministry told them not to publish it, and this is a large problem because journalists always rely on information that they get, but they're not allowed to tell who it came from, they can't publish the source, they just say it came from security sources or something, but with the Freedom of Information Act they can publish their sources last year. What improved this year is something that improved with a law that was passed, and it was a law which basically states that the government needs to release all their information based on this law. It's about a thousand different reports on human rights policies in China, financial rights, there's about naked swimming, all sorts of other reports. There's also one on Karl Dioro Tugutenberg, who's the former federal minister of economics and energy, who asked for those reports and then plagiarized them in his own doctoral thesis, his PhD thesis, which then eventually got him removed from office. So he had a few reports that he'd asked for, but now they have to be released, and the German government, and so we basically went to them and asked them, it doesn't make sense that we have to ask for every single one of the thousand ones, why don't you just release all of them on your home page, and up to this point they haven't done it yet. So now we had to take other measurements and created an online database with all the titles of this scientific service, and you can basically click on the titles of these, and by doing so you asked directly towards the government for that report to be released, and this is what caused it basically to look like this at the government, and the government was a bit baffled, and they were a bit like, what are we going to do with our three thousand requests we got within two weeks? So what did they did was they went to the NMS tree and they just basically tried to change the law basis, and they basically, because they wanted to get rid of this obligation, but after three weeks after the campaign of us sending these kind of automated clicked requests, they just decided to publish everything online on the website without having there be any need for an official request being filed. I think it's really interesting to look what happened in the background here, what we basically did was we caused economic pressure onto the government, basically we and you all made so many requests, so it was cheaper for them to release all the documents than not releasing the documents, and I think there's a very interesting mechanism that I'm going to go back to later on. So we had this infrastructure that we created, and the question is where are we going to target this one next, and we kind of thought, why don't we take a central topic of the CCC, which is surveillance, and what are we going to do? Who are we going to ask about surveillance? It's the employment agencies of Germany, 409 in total, 409 job centers in Germany that all have enormous capacities and rights to surveil their so-called clients, and everybody who lives on their bill, and they send kind of a questionnaire out to whoever is on their files, and this is a questionnaire that wants to understand the father of a child, and you have to state whoever you slept with during the time that you conceived the child, if you can't state who is the father of the child, please state why you cannot provide a name of who is the father of your child, and this is just one excerpt of what job agencies in Germany can do, and they do this because they have to sanction if somebody is doing somewhat of like illegal claiming of money that they shouldn't be getting, and they want to, so basically what we did was question fragtestad.de slash job center, which is what they try to do, so they can target their the job centers, and we've tried to get access to all these documents, our sanctions are being distributed, how job centers act upon sanctions, and up to this point there's so many people who entered in on this, every job center has been asked, and half of all these internal guidelines are now online, and published already, it's half of them, and you get funny emails like Dear Mr Bayer, I got rid of the feeling, no I'm sorry it's really, we're moving on to the next email, sorry for that translation. This email basically states that they can't release the guidelines because they are based upon personal experience, so because they are basically copyrighted under creative commons law, and because we were so amazed by this kind of creative response, we created a whole website that's called the standard work on internal guidelines of actions at the employment agencies in Nuremberg, and they have built these guidelines through learning, research and understanding and discussing them. So now we've got the tools of mass questioning, and we honestly want to know what's next, what's next, what kind of interesting list is out there, what kind of ministries do you want to tap into and get interested in, maybe also something like this, this is about Volkswagen, these are the first 300 pages, and you can see that there's a lot of times they reject these kind of question requests of information based on economic reasons and reasoning, and we created this, we created basically a special art piece, it's a paper size A3 in there, hand folded and punched holes. So the question also is what do you do when these kind of mass requests don't work, what do you do when you have to deal with a police of Hamburg? But two years ago, there was a request filed through our website, if they have data set on sport or violence, and most German counties have this kind of file, and this list basically states who's regarded as a hooligan, it's a pretty chaotic way of getting into and on that list, but it's of course especially hard to get removed from that list, and the Hamburg police basically stated no, we do not have a list that lists anybody who's involved in violence and field of sport, and part of the Hamburg senate stated no, yeah we do have one of those files and we have it, we've been having it for nine years, and our big question was what happened there, I asked and got a different answer and the police basically said well that was a big misunderstanding, you asked for a list of violent offenders within the sport field and then they kind of did a little reward game and basically didn't give out the information based because they didn't use the right correct terms that they use for that list, so then we refiled the request and asked for the actual list about and so now we can prove, sorry I got confused with the word game here, so basically we refiled the request and then in turn they send us a bill of 120 euros for having to deal with our request, so we created Sue the state, so we destroyed this, no we didn't, we didn't go quite that far but the domain is ours, don't try anything, no but we did two other very important things, together with wikimedia we created a fee fund, wikimedia covers the fees for freedom of information requests as long as the results of that can be used in wikimedia projects, for instance as a reference as a citation in wikipedia or something that can be added to wiki data, if that is the case then wikimedia may cover your fees, which is a very important project and we also have launched Transparenzklagen transparency lawsuits together with the Society for Freedom Rights and you can become a supporting member. Transparenzklagen.de transparencylawsuits.de is a is a legal fund, we cover your legal fees as long as it looks like your lawsuit may be successful and it has strategic importance and that covers quite a lot of them, so if your freedom of information request gets rejected and you want to see them in court then we can cover your fees and we can give you a lawyer. What does it look like? This is an example, we could have, we didn't cover this but we would have liked to, he asked for the criminal places in Berlin, that's Riga Strasse, he wanted to know more information, have more information about that and the police replied that the police work cannot be calculable or predictable and of course this is the secretification of police, you have to, you have to see them in court and it's great to see that FIF is doing this, so see you in court, we take you to court and if you want we, well we, we help you go to court. We also started constitutional complaint against this from Brian Palantinat, it said that applicants have to prove their identity or they have to supply their identity and this of course goes against Frakt in Staat because Frakt in Staat allows anonymous requests and this is of course against your personal, your basic right to express your identity as you wish and that's why we started a constitutional complaint in Reinhard Palatinat and this proof of identity isn't really clearly defined, what could this look like? This year somebody made a request in Heidelberg and he said that I'm Thomas de Misier and this is my ID card as proof of my identity, now of course he wasn't the minister of the interior and the city replied, yeah here's, here's all you asked for and we're not going to, we're not going to ask for any fees in your special case, so it's completely pointless, it's also unconstitutional because anyone, no matter how old, where they live or where they're from, what country they're from can make these requests, the only people who will be prevented from making requests are them, do you have time to watch that again? No we don't, so I believe that it makes sense to go all the way and sue them and Wikimedia's fund as well as transparency lawsuit fund have the same idea, they want to create economic pressure, if we always fight against these fees, if we always fight against these rejections it's going to become so expensive for the state to practically publish all this information and this is the new shirt that we have, on the back there's still some space left, these are the tour dates that we have, these are some lawsuits and some courts in Germany, so there's quite a room left for the second edition, we hope that we're going to see more of that from you, so our question is, are you in? We have funding, we have a legal fund, we think it's important to do quite a lot more, look at Thuringia where we're going to see decisive action next year, if we can't get this through with a social democrat minister, then we will have lost the fight and we have a short epilogue for you, two years ago Stefan and I up here on stage already wrapped, I don't know if you guys remember this, but after that a lot of people came up to us and said, do it, do it, never, never do it again, please, never do it again, but maybe we can dim the light a little bit, yes thank you, create some atmosphere, we're going to move further to the middle of the stage, so this year we took a new genre, we didn't go for rap again, and we are going to do something on the freedom of information act, Feuer, which in German phonetically sounds like Feuer, and I'm going to try to do my very best to translate the lyrics that they have created towards a Ramstein song, I'm going to spew you my singing because it's not going to be fun for anyone if I do that, so responsible is who knows the files, through Feuer they now need to state the facts, I bring light into the court, only under three, Feuer, so now they're headbanging, which you can see if you're in the audience, but if you're listening to our audio stream this is what's going on on stage, question, question, question, sinful is who keeps files stuck in drawers unpublished regardless of Feuer, Feuer is obviously short for freedom of information act, it document that no one knows is all the same, Feuer, question, question, Feuer ask, question, question, 80, another headbanging again, a document everyone now knows can be a threat, question, another threat is our initiative, question that state and through Feuer now we can start to act, are you in, be part of it, join with Feuer and just with one click get an inside view, Feuer, just one click, gets you an inside view, question, ask, don't be silenced, Feuer, all right I'm going to give you a bit of the audio of what's going on, all right so they ended this with us spraying some lovely confetti into the crowd, beautiful, yeah I think there's probably not going to be much more time for question and answers so thank you already for listening in, if you have any feedback to give do that under the hashtag c3t and you can also send us an email at hello at c3lingo.org um yes and uh thank you so much uh for listening to us um this was uh Philip and Mella translating for you, hopefully we did a good job and everybody got the gist of it, I think we pretty much caught most of what was going on on stage um now we're going back to stage so I think I don't have to ask for another round of applause I think this was a very clear happy crowd oh no we still do have time for questions but only very very few questions how do you want to clear up the stage now and now everybody's whistling again oh we actually do have a question I would like to ask person a microphone for question so yeah what happened to the police uh with the false statement that they gave what are you doing um answer from the stage is oh well somebody filed an official complaint but you have no right to know what uh happened with that when it comes to police matters unfortunately and there's another question from the internet yes there is a question from the internet the question is how do you file questions on uh the german version of the bbc basically uh answer from the stages where there's what's what's not in regards to journalistic content-based things you can uh make requests and it works it's really difficult for uh the ARD and the ZTF which is the first and the second program but um so with those two it's a bit hard uh with the video it usually works quite well uh but principally on principle you can ask and request information from them just as well okay question from microphone two a lot of times you file a request and 30 days away later you have to wait and then you file another request and then they only give you the answer two years later is there any way to speed this up question answer from the stage uh no it's really really difficult those kind of deadlines um are very much stated within the law and it's very little that you can do on on the time that they're allowed to take uh when working on your requests so it's really hard to uh to to speed this process up but i think the more uh a request to file you the faster you will get results unfortunately we're now out of time but you can find Anna at the open knowledge foundations assembly and i would like to ask you please one more big round of a