 It's the building how to build a secret service from Thomas Lohninger and Werner Etter. Your translators are Kay, and my name is Andre. And you're at the 32nd Chaos Communication Congress. The AK Forward is a small little Austrian NGO that has been fighting data retention as the naming clients. And together, Thomas Lohninger and Werner Etter, both from the same NGO, we will tell you something. How you fight mass surveillance in Austria. Two days ago, we had a talk about data retention in Switzerland. We're getting quite a good impression of what's happening in our neighborhood states. And their thesis is the best secret service is the secret service that does not exist, who is not allowed to come into existence, because there's a law proposal in Austria that should install a new secret internal service. Let's have an applause, and the stage is yours. Thank you very much. We'll start right away. Let me explain who's the organization that presents this as AK Forward. Data retention is basically a German name, but they were founded 2009, when Audimax in Austria, the university, was occupied, and there was a quite actual civil society argument going on. And that's the first time we had open discussions about data retention in Austria, 2010, the mission between law people, technician and civil society responsible people. And the first time in the public, there was this public initiative against the planned data retention law. You know that this law was instated very, very late, and then the Austrian government finally decided there was a new connection that you had to do. And we started this civil initiative to, we had to wait until the law was enacted, until we could go against it. We had 106,000 signatures. That's one of the largest among the Austrian initiatives since the Second World War. And that includes written ones on a piece of paper from all the people that would sign it on a piece of paper, but they would still say it's important for them. But data law was enacted, and all the ISPs had to, this is where we had our demonstration. And then we went to court, constitutional court. And you had this on an online, printed out, signed it, and sent it back to us. Rather, not very online procedure, but we got loads and loads of mail. We never realized that the snail mail still comes in bags if it's enough of it. But actually, we had 11,139 written postal snail mail people that would join us before the constitutional court. And we were successful because the Austrian constitutional court deferred the case to the European Court of Justice. And there was this huge, very impressive, very impressive because all the questions we kept asking about ourselves were asked there, was it any good? What has it been done? What's it used for? And nobody knew any good answer. And so the European decree on data retention was abolished, and then included the Austrian law. And we were very, very successful. So it should be, we want to talk about Secret Services, and we want to look back in history. The history I want to talk about starts in 1814-15 with a Congress of Vienna. Someone named Lothar von Metternich lead the stuff with Napoleon. And he just pushed stuff through in German-speaking countries. The secret of transferred letters has been lowered. And he had an anticipate, a liberal state minister of security. This guy, whose name you've just heard, they invented a system which was in the First Republic valid. First police officer of Vienna showed up and told them that Austria needed a Secret Service for Austria. And this service was invented to protect Austria. And it's like it's a similar structure today. Yes, this sort of backs up. This is keeping untranslatable, but we kill everything that before it kills us. This is in the Third Viennese District. This is our, we Germans are coming at the words, this is where the Interior Security Services sit and they used, Mr. Schober had it there and they still do it there. Then the Nazis came. This is the monument on the Vienna-Martin Square where the SS House used to be. The Austrian Gestapo was manned by Austrians, 900 people. Better equipped than the Gestapo in Berlin. And the Austrians participated. Yes, all 70, 70, 80% of the Gestapo people in Austria were Austrians and served their masters well. At the end of the war, this is, you know, the Third Man, the old film, Olsen-Wells, the screen shots here. Then we had the occupation forces. And the Austrians always considered themselves sort of an intermediates square for us. Meetings, you have to realize that we are Third United Nations, based after New York and Geneva. And it's always been, ever since the Vienna, ah, you know, that's the ones, the little spying houses that are all on Austrian buildings in Vienna, NSA. Last year, Erich Merkel presented this talk here and gave the details. Vienna has always been a good turn for spies. This is things we do. We had this in animal law people, where people were persecuted with mafia law. They were taken through the law case for 14 months after being, then they were acquitted. And they were all broke, completely acquitted, free, but broke. Another one of those nice activity in Austria, Michael Ahr, was suspected that he was a leading member of Anonymous, 645. They break in his door, made him do the walk, and everybody found it was not true. Yeah, that's how it works today. The agency, which is about to be empowered by better rules for them. What we planned for 2015, after we won the case about the law, was to be active as well against the Vorratsdatenspeicherung. And what we took is the law which came from the German main law agency. So what we did to, that you should conclude all surveillance stuff and evaluate what does it do. And what we do, what could be done in a complete concept. What surveillance, how surveillance could be measured. And the reason is that we could not only be against surveillance, but we have to hand out concepts against surveillance. And those concepts should be based on science and those facts all include what is the law. We should, we want to empower a screening process how could new laws been evaluated against measures of impact for the... Oh, this was our plan, but then it could have become a quiet year, it should have planned as a year, quiet year. Charlie Hebdo happened at the beginning of January and data retention was back in the argument five minutes later. And we had to confront the question, who are the terrorists and is it us? This is us in front of our interior ministry and asking, never got an answer. This is our interior minister asking for funds for our little organization. We have to realize this is the only money we get. Public funding is not our only private funding. Any donation is welcome. Yes. But we can only get 35% from companies. The guarantees that we are independent, but we have to work by public donations. And now let's go to the state security law. Basic idea is to build an internal secret service in Austria. You had a couple of offices within the army. You must understand there is no law as in Germany or in Switzerland that interior ministry and interior police should be apart from interior security. We have an anti-terrorist office from the police who has been slowly pushing into all the functions of an interior security. And with the new law, they will get there finally. This is this nice quote that we say something if people don't yell very loud, we'll just go on and continue in developing it. This law is very far-reaching. There is no control by court. The director of the agency can decide in itself what they tell the minister and what they don't. Very unconstitutional basically almost. Competence for surveillance. Actually they can basically ask for anything they want to know. Yes, health information from any ministry, from a private company, there is no way you're going to be able to dislike in the U.S. All this data will be kept until six years. Explicitly mentioned is that they will interchange with other secret services outside of Austria. And if the German interior minister says we need the data, they're going to get it without further ask. Even today you must, there's a state attorney and the court order must be given from the enactment of this law. There will be no such, they'll go and get a piece of paper stamped. The separation of, the power separation of the classical democratic state has been broken here. There has been one person responsible, responsible for all of Austria, that will also legalize internet surveillance, open source intelligence. They call it that way really. Without any barrier they can use any software, use any kind of method, whatever, pick up. And maybe that would be interesting for you Germany. And we are introducing what you Germans already have, what we call the people. But we didn't learn anything from what the Germans used, everything that went wrong in Germany. We're going to copy that now. There will be no argument about it. Nobody argued, nobody thought, nobody thought about the consequences. This database will be central database retention for six years. And anybody can be in there. Because not only the suspicious person will be backed in there, but he's, if you're friend with him, you'll be in the same Facebook group, you've got a mail from him. You could be in that database and you might, they might be going to the NSA, they might go to the German Bundesnachlichtenteens. And the evaluation, if this is a danger or not, is internal. Very much minority report. But where is critics? The Ministry, the Secretary of State, like this law, but many, many people, you see on this, all of those criticize this law. Internet provider, religious leaders, constitutional service of the state, criticized it, amnesty international. It's surprising that there's such a big campaign against this law. So we started this campaign against this law. And we started this in the interweb, and it has about 23,000 signers for today. And you're invited to sign this petition, and we won't track where, which your country of origin is. We also collected signatures on location here, and one of the, one of the people created an idea. You could see this on the slides of this young person with stickers on his face. It was his idea. We didn't push him to this. We created an agency and labeled it as a Landesamt für Bespitzlung, which is whatever. So we are heading to the big summer holiday, and every time before the holidays, you get your signers, which denotes a few, you have been a good student. We try to deploy this signers to the ministry of state. Originally, there were 10 different offices planned. Nice pyramid to try to shoot down. Then the Austrian pirates gave us a hand with a little sticker. Using a few little money, you can get a high impact. We also wanted to offer some information material, especially to delegate to the National Assembly. So everybody got a big information package with all the different commentaries on the proposal of the new law, and you can find them, copy them at the A3 stand, and here we come back to Thomas. Yeah, we have to hurry up now. I'd like to show this video. In the SPO, there's raising voices against the law about the law, and he's just someone has just told us that the law will not come as it was proposed to be. It has been changed from about 100 points, and this law has been changed in many parts. This law will install an interior security service with Austria. The Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz und Terrorismus, this new super office, and Austria's answer from Jihadism and everything, all the terrorism. This new law should separate police from this security service. I noticed that it's always been told that all the states surveillance services has been part of the police in Austria, and this police has to be a service for the state and the people, and it should be... But the law looked at closely, and it offered another different assumptions, especially advocates and people in... Too widely said, too many competences, no well defined, and without any obviously control. Whenever you are challenging the rights of the people of the state, it has to be cared about, the people and the state. You have to care about the advocates and the journalists and the medics, and every surveillance has to be checked by a... This... Here we are again. This was sort of the middle of the debate. Suddenly we had a lot of more media pressure, we had this action and brought all the politicians together to one table. Had we not started to act, we wouldn't have gotten that far. We knew from the Greens and the Nios that they were against it, and we knew from the Nios that they were sort of not knowing what to say, but the far right was that we never knew how would they position again, and they are just as worried about their freedom. Actually, in the end, only the representative from the Interior Ministry finally was the only defendant, defended the law, even the social democrat coalition partner gave rather critical comments, and they said they were repairing this and repairing that, and would sort of go with hope that this might be sort of a serious development and become quite something a lot more useful than it was originally intended. And definitely we were asking for parliamentary control, and then... Paris came. Paris happened, the second thing in the city, and everybody in a reflex and said, no, no, no, now we really have to cut back on civil rights, and we had another demonstration in front of the parliament in remembrance of the victims of Paris, and we said, don't use this, make it the law, but this is exactly what they did. Actually, on a Sunday morning, there is quite a picture, Sunday morning, small, just a journalist they wanted to have, nothing in written, no ties, and we're going to tell them, and they told them one story for one and a half days, there was no critical comment, because everybody was still shell-shocked from Paris, and three days later in parliament, they had a new presentation, and it's not ten different offices, but only one. They changed another word from German, which is the German word for ideology, and they changed it into the Latin word of ideology. Nobody's been able to explain to me the difference, and this is a really weird German situation. This is Senate with a judgmental influence. We'll have to create that. Will that be the responsible within the Interior Ministry? He just didn't have to accord. They would suggest to have to build the three men's Senate, and they are not forced to decide. One of them has to decide, and one of them has to be a judge, or you stand, sort of very cosmetical and doesn't make any difference. All the judges union vehemently still opposes. Those are the three founding fathers of the Austrian Republic, that, well, you know, that you don't want to see, want to hear, and want to talk about it. Finally, we're made into the Boulevard, that is the epilogue. Now, this law is going to become law in January. The question is, are we still having an influence, still always the question of how much pressure we can keep up. Five red lines must have a control, must have an independent justice. You can't have that internally handled. The database must be changed. It can be data retention lights with acceptance for every NSA in six years. And they can't put everybody in a two-one group, just because you sort of decide they have a clearer definition where they should be able to act and where not. And the V-people, the provocateur, must be basically taken out of the law, because it's just a bad idea. If this doesn't happen, we will again try to take it to court and against taking it to the constitutional court, like we've done it before. And we will fight against this law, parliamentary process has not been over yet. We still have hope. We shall see. And if not, we have to go back to court. We have to be accepted with the... We have a little aspect. There's European mention, it's a human rights law. If that case goes through, and we'd have a lot more clear reason to be accepted by the Constitutional law than my influence also in law cases in Germany, because it's a pan-European decision, and it's exactly about this indirect influence in congruent and internal... Secret services are best avoided by not being founded in the first place. We need your help in the next two weeks and asking for funds. Okay, we'll be taking questions now. Thank you, Rana. Sorry, we don't have any time. We have just... Maybe you could be available after the talk. For personal contact and discussion. So you could see here the addresses and the contact stuff, and just get in touch, support them.