 Good morning. Welcome. Good morning on this fourth day of Congress. It's great that so many of you left their beds for Fragt in Start and Anna Semsrott. He's very well known at Congress, so I don't need to introduce him any further. You know the thousands of lawsuits that German officials get from him and from his team and from all of you, because all of you can't participate. So take it away, Anna. Thank you. We'll start with a small preliminary discussion. I'm going to have to disappoint you three times. If any of you got out of bed early to watch the music performance, that's not going to happen. And because Stefan's not here and I'm not going to do this on my own, because that would be embarrassing. If any of you came because of the CSU, there's not a lot about them, even though it's in the subtitle of the talk. But that's only because I thought we'd have a minister of the interior of the CSU by this time, which hasn't happened yet. But everything's better if you add, despite the CSU at the end of it. And the third disappointment I have in store for you is this. Yeah, OK. So, yeah. OK, heard me. Yeah. Me wurde gesagt, der Bart ist groß. I was told my beard is to blame. Bitte sagt das nicht Konstanz. Please don't tell this to Konstanz, because otherwise I'm going to get comments on my beard for the rest of the year, for the entire next year. 2017, the big feeling of the big political feeling I had that year was powerlessness. The feeling of being unable to do anything about what happens in politics. And that feeling is something you can also have if you look at the development of freedom of information in Germany. So the laws that guarantee the access to state information, that's what the map of freedom of information looked last year, and this year it looks like this. Not a lot has changed. There were some initiatives in North Rhine-Westphalia. There was supposed to be a transparency law that means that information needn't just be published by request, but it would actually have to be published proactively. So many contracts would have had to be published online. They wrote that law, and then, shortly before the election, the social democrats withdrew their approval, and that's why we don't have a transparency law in North Rhine-Westphalia, not. It's fairly similar in Thuringia where the social democratic and green government wrote a similar law, and the social democrats are currently blocking it. And it's similar in Berlin where the social democrats are again blocking it. So it appears that this kind of law is something for the opposition, but when you're in power, you may not want to have this kind of law, and that's why we wrote our own transparency law for Berlin. You can look at it online. You can comment it. And then we are going to start a referendum in the next couple of years, because if this kind of initiative doesn't come from within parliament, then we have to start it from without parliament. But what's more decisive is the four federal states that you see in red on this map. They still don't have any freedom of information laws, and it gets even more absurd when you look at the situation in Europe. If you see who else has freedom of information laws that's pretty much everything except Luxembourg, Austria, and Belarus. So these four federal states of Germany are in the same line as Austria. And those four are Bavaria. Bavaria still doesn't have a freedom of information law, which is unlikely to get under this Christian social democratic social union. Lower Saxony has seen a draft from the red and green government, but then their term in office was cut short, and there was no vote on it. But that may not be so bad, because it would have been the worst freedom of information act in Germany, and we have HES, where the government has published a draft for freedom of information law, which really is going to become the worst freedom of information law in Germany, because it provides it means that the police and the secret services don't need to answer to freedom of information requests. And the fourth federal state without a free information law is Saxony, the typeface was provided like that by the manufacturer. The conservative and social democratic government promised to write this kind of law. They're probably focused on something else at the moment, and that means that the Saxon police shown, of which you see an example here, doesn't have to respond to freedom of information requests as they would in other states. There's been a relaunch of the website of the Minister of the Interior and also the freedom of information website now looks like this. Freedom of information act, freedom of information requests not at any cost, so that's the reputation within the administration. If you would like to compare these laws, you might like to look at the transparency ranking. That was the preliminary discussion. Let's start with the first half. It's about the access to knowledge and the access to power. And we were going to look at what we have been successful. One example, the army did a lot of advertisements and did a new way, and they printed pizza cartons. They distributed to pizza bakeries, so pizza eaters could be recruited. And we asked them what did this cost? The answer is 202,000 euros for pizza cartons, for 7,000 pizza cartons. And we are thinking that it's usual with the Bundeswehr, the army, only 400,000 actually went into work. And you can ask with every demonstration authority which demonstrations have been registered. You can look into it and ask how many participants are there. You can ask for lobbyism. The Target Spiegel had a report on Gerhard Schröder. They asked for documents from the Economic Ministry. And we then saw that Gazprom could get a date within three days at the ministry. And in the EU, we asked the EU Commission what documents they had to so-called fake news. The answer was this. If you zoom a bit, it's essential to avoid either government or private forms of sorry, blanked out. Private forms of censorship. That's so beautiful. We're going to make an art edition of it to hang somewhere. We have questions at Frontex about the training of the Libyan Coastal Guards, the so-called Coastal Guard. The EU said we are training them and we are putting a focus on human rights. And we got their training materials, 20 materials, their videos. And one slide is this, one slide. And it says, Menschenrechte human rights. And that's not so much of a focus. It's more about document recognition. It's about facial recognition. It's a slide about facial recognition. Is it the same person, same person? And you can see on which level these trainings actually haven't happened. And now it's no wonder that people die in the Mediterranean. There was the G20. The G20 team was pretty much overwhelmed by questions. So thanks to you. And before the G20, there were these, the Berlin party police, the party police, police who went home before G20 because they had three birthday parties at the same time and demolished some stuff, did some damage. And some people, according to rumors, just played around with their weapons. And the police said, yeah, sure, get the information, but it's 100 euro. And we thought, yeah, that's about 10 caskets of Sternburg. We didn't want to pay it ourselves. So we put down a crowdfunding page and wasted too much time. And we had all the money in half an hour. And we could pay that. And got these internal research. It's not as important because of the content, but because of the details on how the police goes with these research. They went to the policemen and asked, did you drink too much? And they said, no. And that's the principle of it. And you find some very specific denials and these that police says, there was no singing of Wuppertal sons of horse and no demonstrative pissing in with the whole squad. No collective urination for the purposes of a demonstration. So that was the first halftime. So this advertisement for the fragmented start, you can download it in the beta version. And information, freedom, stays, handwork, handiwork. Who has the power if it's about powerlessness? I think much of these powerlessness comes from not knowing who has the power. Who is deciding? And this year, I looked at the weather law, the law of the German weather service. So traffic minister Dobrik said, we'll make all weather service data, open data. So I called at the press and asked for the law. And they said, no, we wrote it, but we don't have the draft of the law yet. So we went to the weather service. This is your law. Give me your law draft. No, it's not what we can do. This is the, so I went to Spiegel online. They wrote about it, sent me this. They said, no, we don't have it. And what we have is just based on the DPA post. So I went to the DPA, sent me the law. They said, no, it's about the press, from the press note. And they said, OK, who could have it, looked at the whole plan, maybe refer it, refer it. DG22, I called, put down the true mails. They didn't say anything, no, they didn't get the law. And I remember, he got some emails from the lawyers. They were like this law, draft this law. So I wrote them, got you to get me the law draft. And after 10 minutes, I got it. Then have you been put to earth? So I OCRed it, I sent it to the traffic ministry and told them, here you have your own law draft. And they didn't even thank me, completely impolite. But this is not a single example. All drafts, after they've been passed by the governments and all statements from lobbyists are non-public. And we thought we have to do something about this. And together with Upgot and Watch, we got a list of all drafts of the past four years and all lobbyists who submitted statements for them. And we ended up with a list of 17,000 documents and wrote to all ministries and asked if they didn't want to publish those documents proactively. We got polite refusals and thought, OK, we're going to have to change the tact and build this database that was searchable for the documents titles. And when you clicked a title of a document, it would automatically send a Freedom of Information request to the respective ministry. That led to so many requests being sent to federal ministries within weeks as it took within the entire past year. And we had to pause it at some point because all ministries or ministers met and finally decided to publish all of those documents. And they're now all public on the ministry's websites. You can see them online on the websites of the respective ministries or just centrally escaped at tenumna.me. And we're very happy that this mechanism of mass requests is now being copied by others. This is RCU. They started a campaign about the travel costs of all EU commissioners. And now they have to publish their travel budgets. This leads us to the third half. Open knowledge is empowerment. It's what can you do about this powerlessness? A great example of this is the police of Cologne. A year ago, they were facing heavy criticism because they were being accused of conducting racial discrimination. And we approached them and sent a Freedom of Information request and wanted to get all of the protocols from that New Year's night. So these are being written by individual police people and being submitted to the archive. And we wanted to know what they wrote into these because that would allow us to know what actually happened. They refused this and said they would conduct an internal investigation. We sued them. And the Cologne Police Department will hopefully be forced to open these documents. But probably at 2019, the earliest, because everyone's very busy. But that's OK. We want to set an example and want to make it known that this kind of thing has to be published. And but we were getting some very nasty comments on Facebook accusing us of being disrespectful, despicable hooligans. And we thought, despicable hooligans, yes, that's us. And so we started a campaign to legalize office technology instead of pyrotechnics. Yes, so we're the despicable hooligans. So what do despicable hooligans do? They sue out of principle. These are some of the authorities we've been seeing in the past year. Some quick examples of as long as we have time. The Job Center in Berlin, Friedrichsang Kreuzberg, we sued them because they wanted us to show information for our freedom of information request. We told them and said, no, that's not. There's no need to provide identification for a freedom of information request. They said, well, that's up to us to decide. And we told them, no, it's really not. But apparently, these can only be provided to these require identification because there are fees attached. But even that response had fees attached. So it was entirely absurd. And we won. We sued the defense department twice. The first was about contracts with YouTube stars. They get YouTubers to advertise to get young recruits. And we wanted to see those contracts. And the Department of Defense said, no, those are business secrets of the YouTubers. We wanted to see them in court. And a few months later, they said, oh, yes, we had another look. And we don't actually have those contracts. So they knew they contained secrets, but didn't know that they didn't have the contracts. We also wanted to know what speeches the Minister von der Leyen gave during non-public events, which she often does. We wanted to have the protocols. But they told us, no, those are secret. We sued them. And a few months later, they said, we don't actually have any speech drafts of Minister von der Leyen. So they knew that those were secret before they knew that they didn't even have them. Those were two lawsuits that we want quite easily. We don't know much more. We just know about the knowledge management of the Defense Department. And if you want to sue somebody, we can support you at transparentslagen.de. We give you lawyers and money for your lawsuits. And that leads us to, over time, all of this powerlessness just increases when the laws that we would like to apply cannot be applied. And so we can't ask the Secret Services, according to the Information Freedom Act. But there were older documents we could get from the Federal Archive. I wish we can't anymore, because the law of the Federal Archive got changed. So the Secret Services don't have to give the documents there anymore. So not only a new documents, but all documents are a secret forever now. The BND, the Secret Service, was very happy about that and said they did it. So people couldn't ask the archives anymore to undermine the Secret Services. We saw in single cases what happens. That's a Jewish rabbi, Shlomo Liven, who got killed in the beginning of the 80s by a neo-Nazi. And the Secret Service knows something about this. But because of these changes, they don't have to show these files we could have sued for before. And the BND, NSA, all these things, they don't have to go into the archive and will be secret even in decades. Oh, that's a great illustration of powerlessness. We thought, what can we do? Thought, what other laws there are? There was the environmental information law. This is a very special thing for environmental influence. And that's on European level. So Secret Services can't go into that. So that sounds far away, but it's very close. But it's about everything related to environment, everything what's foul smelling or something is everything environmental stuff. So if you have something about a bomb or something, it's an environmental information according to this. So we wrote the Secret Service after this law. We would like to have everything about environmental information. And so they said, no, this law doesn't apply to us. And so we sued them against the Secret Service. This will be done by the administrative court in Cologne. So we went to the outer Secret Service with all your environmental innovation. And they said, no. And so we sued them against the BND. The Federal Administrative Court will decide on that next year. It's very interesting how the BND reacts against this case. It's like 15 pages long, a bit background, a bit of research on Fraktienstadt, where they say Fraktienstadt is financing themselves through so-called crowdfunding, which is true. And here it gets interesting why they can't be sued. Standing me as a person of Fraktienstadt is just about researching everything they can about the state and not actually about the environment. And they said, this was not critically case-oriented, but just went out and willy-nilly. And I looked up how many questions we sent them and what's like three. And what's really mean of us is that this case seems to just be there to show the BND as a bunch of idiots. But we actually do want to save the environment. And sometimes we save it if we save it from the BND. Both of these cases costing about 10,000 euros. If you want to support us, you will get some stuff. If you donate to us certificate on this, you can write why you are helping, just because you want to know everything, because you want to present them as idiots, because you want to abuse it, or whatever the hell you want. Thank you. Good. That's it, actually. I still have time. Wow, we have time for a question. Thank you, Arne. And since everyone is here in the hall, Arne, I will ask you a question. First of all, I would like to send a signal if there is a question and that seems to be the case. Personally, I asked the signal and the first is the question. There's no question, but a lot of... Standing ovation, so to say, from the audience there. So, where should we send a Bitcoin coin? And Ethereum and all the other coins that you have? Yes, we have Bitcoin coins. I think we have a lot of Bitcoin in between. Yeah, I think we do have something there. The assembly of the Open Knowledge Foundation and of the Praktenstaat, if you go out of the hall in the big assembly hall in front of the kids' base, it's very nice. You can get the t-shirts and hoodies and find you as well. Great. So, wish you a great day. Oh, there's a question, actually. We can do one. We can do one. Thanks for the great talk. I used the platform before. We can do one. We can do one. We can do one. We can do one. We can do one. You used the platform for an eventual topic. But my question is, I live in Bavaria. We can do, like, a referendum in Bavaria with the CESU, the Conservatives. We can have this law in this way. Yes. I think the CED is behind the draw. The Berlin Information Law and CED. Certain things may be different in there, but you can use CED zero in other places as well. First of all, thank you for your work. I was wondering how, what other ways are support and to support you, apart from money? You can support us by submitting your own requests. You also have your first in law. You can help us a lot with all the lawsuits. You can also find our code at GitHub. The project is called Freude. And we're very thankful for all collaboration on the platform. We're developing things on the platform, and we can do it with each and every helping hand. Thank you.