 Hello thanks for a nice introduction. So a lot was already said. So three years ago many of us were shocked to learn that we're not the paranoid conspiracy theorists but that many of the things we expected was actually true. Our entire digital world is under total surveillance. Famous person Edward Snowden said that he quote sitting at his desk could wiretap anyone. And it's like not just like about the serious things it's about really anyone and everyone. It's about games and porn. It's about the wailing people. Yeah playing Angry Birds. It's about the wailing people watching porn to have an opportunity to discredit them afterwards. And yes everyone even includes chancellors of countries. And we will show you a short video now. With the reaction. Yeah. We needed full screen. Yeah maybe some of the English people speaking people here don't know it yet because it I think it wasn't translated into English so much so you can read the subtitles. And you know here. For both the vermeintlichen Total Auschwähung in Deutschland ist nach den Angaben der NSA des britischen Dienstes und unserer Nachrichtendienste vom Tisch. Es gibt in Deutschland keine millionenfache Grundrechtsverletzung. Yeah. And then just a few months later things came out and our chancellor Merkel said something slightly different. That's a no go. That's a no go. But we all know like the narrative of Germany and the US being very close partners. And it's not about being close partners only in a diplomatic way. It's also about being a close partner in the spy agency way. And Edward Snowden said fairly at the beginning of the revelations that NSA and our German foreign secret service BND would be in bed together. Now to the political reactions. What came like after all those notes revelations were like was written about in Germany. As I have already mentioned there was this inquiry committee established. And it's the only inquiry committee that evolved after the Snowden revelations. So there's kind of something special about it in Germany. Yeah. So the German federal Bundestag the federal parliament is investigating the spying accusations of the five eyes and the involvement of the German spy agencies. So how much mass surveillance is actually being done. And when this inquiry was formed the BND and this is a quote from an internal document of theirs that we leaked that BND had great concern that such an inquiry committee would focus on the activities of the BND sighing division of looking what the hell the BND is actually doing and not only the NSA the GCHQ and the five eyes. So that's what we tried to do as journalists and that's what the committee was also trying to focus on. Like the work of the committee is kind of complicated because like the primary source of information for them are documents that the public shouldn't see. And it's like a lot of a lot of documents. By now it's almost two thousand four hundred folders of documents of paper which might sum up to millions of pages. And those millions of pages are not easily readable from time to time because there's a lot of black on the pages. So there's also the people trying to kind of get to know what the BND does together with the NSA and the other five eyes. They can't see it because it's too secret for them to see it. So one aspect of the work that the inquiry is doing is they're asking government ministers and chancellories and the BND give us your documents so we can read what you have been doing. And in addition to reading the documents which we are not a part of there are the public hearings of witnesses and experts in the Bundestag rooms where we go to yeah to watch those hearings. Officially streams are forbidden. Recordings are illegal. You could get kicked out of parliament and never be let in again. But they say maybe you've seen the theater representation in last night at the very beginning because the public can come into the building that yeah the hearings are somehow public even there's no even if there is no recording or transcription. So what we do is we go there and we live transcribe ourselves. We go to the hearings and we transcribe everything all the parliamentarians the government and witnesses are saying. And that's cumbersome work. So we have printed out the Internet of what we've done and we have about three folders of what we wrote in the last two and a half years standing right here right now. And after the talk if you're interested in the printout of the Internet just come by and we can give you a copy of your favorite witness hearing. But it's not just about like writing what's happening there. It's like if you can't go there and if you didn't see the situation then it's really difficult to get an impression on which people are sitting there. Like what are the people working at those spy agencies and surveilling the world and helping to surveil the world. And therefore like Stella did starts to draw those people who testify in front of the committee and because drawing yeah drawing like the witnesses like two or three times doesn't make so much sense. She began to form the witnesses out of modeling clay and you can see those witnesses in the exhibition next to the wardrobe I think for the next days. So who are those witnesses in the inquiry hearing in Bundestag? Well witness number one is called Edward J. Snowden because it doesn't take a lot of brain power to discover that he is an important person that could reveal information that is relevant to the committee's cause of investigating what the whole Secret Services are actually doing but as you probably heard there is a huge fight a political fight he hasn't been in the inquiry hearing yet and there are only four more hearings in January and February and unfortunately as of now it is pretty much yeah there's a pretty low chance if even that he will actually be heard by the committee. And that makes like people not believe in the seriousness anymore and Glenn Grewald who like wrote about many of the documents told the German politicians as they invited him that they care far more about not upsetting the US and not destroying like their partnership than they do about conducting a serious investigation. So in solidarity with Glenn also didn't come. So what did we actually learn from all those documents the press releases the statements and the witness hearings. Well first of all B&E really and the German spy agencies really are in bed together with the five eyes with the other spy agencies from the US UK New Zealand Australia and Canada they're doing similar things they're doing mass surveillance in of the digital world and also the German spy agencies like the others are extremely bending or sometimes plainly outright breaking the law. We have a few of those funny theories they make up and for example there's satellite interception and to satellite interception there's like yeah basically a limit set by the law and the B&E didn't like this so they thought about how could we circumvent this limit and they invented the space theory. So they said like all those satellites they aren't in Germany they are in space and if we intercept the satellites then it's not a Germany so we don't have to comply to the law and they I think the worst thing on this is that they made up the theory after Snowden so they did this for a really long time and then as they noticed like it's really getting yeah uncomfortable in here they thought about like how could we explain this. So their theory is in Bavaria in Bad Eibling where the station with the red domes is where they're surveying satellite communication somehow German law does not apply because they're gathering information from the satellites in space but it gets even weirder because they're extending that to the so-called virtual foreign countries. This is one of the many buildings that the Frankfurt Internet Exchange Statistics has housed it and the B&E is saying yeah well we're surveying fiber optic cables on German soil from a German IXP but it's a virtual foreign country because technically we're trying to get international data transfers from those German fiber optic lines again so German law doesn't apply there. And it gets yeah even funnier we can translate it to the functionary theory and it says that if you are in a function if you are a German and you are in the foreign country and working for maybe the EU and yeah you write emails then you don't have any protection of your fundamental rights like yours privacy because you are in a function and you are not a German and fundamental rights don't apply to you. So what other things did we learn from the inquiry committee besides weird legal theories that don't really stand up to a legal test? Well we learned about a few operations that the German spy agencies were doing in the past. The first operation that has been most widely reported and talked about is so-called operation ICONR which ran from 2003 to 2008. It was a joint operation of the German BND and the NSA and it was happening in Frankfurt Germany and they were tapping an internet exchange of the German telecom. The weirdest part is they always said yeah we're only surveying foreigners we're only surveying terrorists so you might say okay Frankfurt internet exchange that's maybe not so foreign but then on this internet exchange there's many cables from carriers coming together for doing peering for making the internet work and we found out that this BND was tapping cables running from Vienna to Amsterdam and cables running from Luxembourg to Prague. Now they always keep telling us it's only about the terrorists in Afghanistan or Somalia but I think that's not really terrorist. And there are other operations. There is one operation you are not even allowed to say the name of it's like Kluteig and it says that the last three letters like AIC are if you reverse them it's CIA and so it's a cooperation between the BND and the CIA and they used like a German provider MCI Worldcom which is now known as Horizon and there they tapped allegedly phone and fax communications. So another operation that we learned about in the inquiry committee although we always expected it was when Klaus Landefeld came to the inquiry committee and told yeah well after operation Icona and tapping the internet exchange in Frankfurt from Deutsche Telekom the BND came again and said okay now we want to tap DAY6 the big Frankfurt internet exchange and when Klaus was in the inquiry committee he said well the BND came and basically they demanded a full take. They wanted everything of all the things that could possibly of all the traffic that could possibly be routed by DAY6. Now after some legal back and forth it was clamped down a little bit because of legal by because of legal restrictions back then but still part of the surveillance the the German foreign spy agency did inside of Germany was of six German ISPs. So instead of going to the German internet operator and saying well we want to tap your cables they went to DAY6 to the internet exchange and said we want all traffic that comes to you from this German provider. There is the other operation which is called monkey shoulder and there's a suspicion that it's called after whiskey and it's a operation between the GCHQ the NSA and they wanted to go to the Deutsche Telekom and get the transit communication and transfer the raw data to the foreign secret services and one special thing about this operation is that allegedly the chancellery was not informed so even those who should watch like the surveillance didn't know about it or at least they say they didn't know about it and this operation started in 2012 and it was stopped after the Snowden revelations came out because they said like okay it's getting a bit too hot in here. So and then it gets murky. The inquirer committee was able to investigate the ancient operations ICONAL and GLOTIG without being able to say the name GLOTIG they always had to say GLO but from the other operations we somehow found out that there's another operation called warp drive which the BND does together with the NSA and another partner but we don't know which one we don't know where it ran we don't know what provider was targeted and we didn't we don't even know if it already ended we just know the name and we would be interested in more information on that. And there is a lot of other interception operations and we see like a table here but one thing about this table is that it's only operations that ended and they're not running because we don't get to know anything about operations that are still taking place today it's just about like things in the past so we don't really know what's going on right now and it's also that in the inquiry committee they can only talk about operations with the five eyes that means like the Canadians the people from New Zealand Australia Britain and the US but we don't know anything about operations with other countries and yeah there might be many many more so but the blackout ones here we really revealed this list of the operations that the German spy agency BND is doing but the blackouts even the members of the inquiry committee are not allowed to find out what the hell that actually is that the Secret Services are doing they are supposed to look into this ancient and by now I'm bored of operation Iconol and Glotike and the more interesting stuff of what is going on now in this very moment that's not for them to investigate this is one of the favorite slides of one of the members in the inquiry committee I don't know if you remember that it's about an operation called rampart a and it looks as if the NSA is using local partners in other countries to do the tapping for them and then gather all the data so we had the running theory I think it's almost confirmed now is that operation icon was such a thing where the BND went to internet exchange in Germany did a little filtering out of Germans surveying the fiber optic cables and then giving that data pretty much in raw shape to the NSA now whether the BND knows that it's giving the data to the NSA or not that is an open question the inquiry committee has not yet found out but this slide shows that the NSA definitely has operations where the local partner does not know that the NSA is getting way more than they said publicly another thing is excuse gore excuse gore is a tool and it has kind of the nickname NSA is Google because it's like a tool to search through a massive amount of data and it's used by the German secret services it's used in but I bling by the BND since 2009 and had a predecessor that ran since 2007 and it's also deployed in other post but we have like here kind of here murky testimonials about this and they're running at least in test mode and this kind of thing in test mode is also running in our domestic secret service and there was like the contract published that how they got this thing from the NSA and they got it for free so they didn't pay anything for it at least not money so there was kind of the deal we give you all the equipment and you give us the data that you get out of there so during the Snowden revelations when the name axe keyscore came up everyone was pretty freaked out because it was one of the first and one of the big revelations and our German government said oh oh those Americans they're doing really fancy stuff there but we would never do that but the inquiry found committee found out that for years and years the BND has been using the exact same tool in the exact same way another tool that even goes beyond what the NSA is doing is a tool called verus that's a tool that the BND developed together with the German armed forces of Bundeswehr and it gathers metadata communication metadata of who communicates when with whom like classic data retention stuff and the special thing about this tool verus is that it captures all the metadata of all traffic on a communication line like a fiber optic cable so it's not being selected at all only a little tiny part of obviously German communications are thrown away but we learned that the NSA is apparently retaining for three four or five hops of metadata communication well look the BND is gathering all hops so in one of the first hearings a BND witness said oh yeah we're retaining like six hops of metadata and we were like six hops there is an experiment it's called the small world experiment it's also known in English speaking world as a so-called six degrees of separation that every human on this planet knows every other human over six hops of people in between so when the BND is actually collecting what they say recently oh yeah the system wouldn't stop you if you were to look into nine ten twelve hops but it gets slower but it gets the system gets slower yeah so this was one of the things that was pretty interesting for us that the BND is not limiting metadata at all so now there's being a hacker icon we wouldn't have gotten our talk accepted if we didn't drop some formerly non-public information so we have some ODA for here now used to be classified secret we have like amounts of metadata collected and retention periods of metadata for the different outposts of the BND so we have Schöningen here and it's two million metadata a day and with a retention time of ten years like ten years but I bling one of the most famous outposts of the BND in Germany is collecting five million metadata every single day and is retaining that for three months Reinhausen another outpost it's collecting 15 million points of metadata every single day and is retaining that for six months gobbling in we don't really know a lot about that but that's an outpost that collects a hundred one hundred and eighty million points of metadata every single day and is retaining them for an entire year and polar BND's central BND's HQ as of now is collecting an additional twenty million points of metadata every single day and is retaining them for ten years and this is unique because as opposed to the other outposts before this is collecting the data that is coming from tapping points of fiber optic cables like on the Frankfurt internet exchange and if you do the math and you sum up all this you come to the number of 220 million metadata per day and then you might ask yourself like what is the BND doing with this metadata does the BND keep this metadata no it doesn't yes they do but yeah they keep it but then there's a number and that's the metadata per month pushed directly to the NSA it's like 1.3 billion metadata monthly so it's not it's sitting on a BND server and the NSA can query it the BND gathers this data and then pushes it on to a server directly to the NSA hardware so metadata is taken by every single communication on a communication line that this German spy agency is tapping but apparently content of communications like the contents of emails or phone calls are only selected which is means like you brought a big fishing net with some of those communication types identifiers like browser IDs the most typical ones are IP addresses email addresses stuff like that phone numbers but they're they get way more detail it can be credit card numbers they can be cookie identifiers there's many types of selectors and if communication is hit by a selector then it's stored away somewhere for further processing now how many selectors do we have the BND has 14 million selectors that come directly from the NSA the NSA is giving the BND 14 million selectors that the BND is running in its systems in its systems and trawling the communication lines it taps for and of these 40,000 were found to be against so-called German or EU interests after the BND looked into what the hell is are these things that the NSA is giving us who are the targets of the communication that the NSA wants us to surveil for them and they started to investigate like what is against those German and EU interests after Snowden so and under strange circumstances because they like started investigating this in different outposts kind of independently and they didn't know about each other allegedly and that's weird because they knew about like critical selectors way before yes already in 2005 the BND found out that it had selectors about European companies EADS and Eurocopter and that the NSA wanted the BND to spy on those companies now they're not the most likeable companies exporting arms and military gear to the entire world but they are partly German companies and Europe and European companies so the BND is legally not really able to spy on them but they did for the NSA but the committee members are not allowed to see those selectors like they should investigate what the BND was doing wrong and how what could make better but they are not allowed to really look into what they used to spy for the NSA against German and EU interests so there was a special commissioner there was a special commissioner was called like a person of trust but he was not a person of trust for the committee he was a person of trust elected by the chancellor like those who are kind of responsible for all the wrongdoings of the BND and he wrote kind of report where he said like yeah they had this and this and there was only like a public version which said nothing concrete no concrete selectors we got to know and he adapted like the BND theories in wide parts of his report so only because of the enquiry committee we the BND itself found out that it has 40,000 selectors of the NSA against German European interests so the committee said okay now that you discovered this because of us we want to see them right but the chancellor chancellor office said no the enquiry committee but also other control committees pretty much no one except the chancellor read BND itself and the special person were allowed to see them so the opposition in parliament and the so-called G10 commission were suing the federal government to be allowed to have a look at those 40,000 selectors that are known to be against German and European interests but unfortunately both of those court cases was struck down one on yeah formal reasons one of formal reasons and one because they didn't really have standing unfortunately so no one is able gonna be able to see them until someone leaked something but there is not only NSA selectors that the BND is using the BND is also using selectors on his own interests and sometimes they even take like the NSA selectors see that they are kind of interesting and just put them into their own list of selectors it's 3,300 and yeah you could suspect that if the BND uses selectors they are in the German interest but even those the BND is using himself are against German and EU interests and it's these 3,300 that are against those interests there are many more but we can only see those who have been deactivated after those like investigations what's wrong so what does it mean this is also theoretical but we do have a few example of those selectors the BND is actively spying on the French ministers of foreign affairs and the BND is spying on EU institutions the commissions of member states and for example like we said before our Commissioner Gunther Oettinger the BND is spying on NATO and fellow NATO members and on the International Monetary Fund the BND is spying on the International Criminal Court aka the Hague and it's spying on the World Health Organization it's spying on OPEC the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries it's spying on the United Nations Children's Fund UNICEF for Christ's sakes BND is spying on the United Nations office on drugs and crime UNODC and those are just the selectors for someone that you want that you want to surveil and then in your system on your hard drives ends up all their communication then there's also this concept called bycatch that if someone communicates with someone you're surveying that communication is also stored and we have some funny examples of bycatch too the BND was spying on John Kerry and on Hillary Clinton as she was like the minister of foreign affairs and the BND was spying on a German journalist that was communicating with an Afghan minister and that's especially illegal since the German spy agency is supposed to not be allowed to spy on Germans unless it has explicit reason and legal justification for it yeah and the BND always says like they filter out all the German communications they have a filter system that they called DAFIS which is short for data filter system but this filter system has some problems because it does not work well enough because it's kind of in the first stage is a bit primitive it sorts out all the phone numbers which begin with plus four nine so if you're a German and you have another phone because you're maybe living in the foreign country then yeah bad for you they also sort out like domains like dot DE so if you have like a Google mail dot com address yeah that's a pity and they try out to filter German IPs which is kind of strange because it's really difficult to say like from an IP if it's really in Germany especially if you use like tools that you know kind of what try to hide your IP address and they say they filter out stuff when they detect oh it's spoken in German we got something we got like this by care just in German so we throw it away but that's only possible like if they already got a hit on you so that's already kind of illegal and then they say this throw it away so and they always say this filter works then I went to a member of the government coalition and said look we have a dark domain I communicate in English and I use a VPN and tour so I'm not in the filter so I'm not filtered out right but I'm a German I have German rights and I said well you're shit out of luck but for cases like this with netspolitik.org there's another level of a blacklist but unfortunately we only found out about 20 or so domains that were on them and one of them was the firefighters Ingolstadt which we didn't really understand why but maybe it's time to reread the Illuminati trilogy that that filter is not only is not really an invention of the BND they always say oh it works the filter works we're filtering out all Germans and we even have a certification we gave it to the federal office of information security BSI and they certified it as it works but when asked by the inquiry committee the guy who actually did that specific that certification said well yeah they gave me a machine but I didn't really know what to do with it so I just read some freaking manual and decided that it sounds okay what they did in there in the end it was revealed that the witness itself said well what the machine does only really the BND and God know what what it really does that counts as certification then we ask ourselves like how good or how bad are the filters working like what are the numbers we are looking for what are the percentages of people being filtered out if they are Germans and there were numbers like 95% there were numbers like 99% and that sounds like quite a lot that sounds like quite good but if you look at the numbers then you have like terabytes and terabytes and terabytes of data and you have millions of connections and if you take those millions and terabytes and then you have the 99% then it's a mass of fundamental rights violation per day and then the question is what happens with all this data and metadata that the BND collects and gives to the NSA there's really serious consequences for example there are drone strikes and we can't go too much into detail but yeah you can watch the talk this was given yesterday the global assassination grid and then you can see what the Americans can do with the metadata they got from Germany partly connected to drones there was also like the base Rammstein and we had like a witness in the inquiries which was Brandon Bryant a former drone operator and he said Rammstein is absolutely essential to the US drone program all the information and data goes through Rammstein for the whole world so they couldn't do their drone operations without their station in Germany so this is NSA general Alexander Hayden and you know probably his famous quote of we kill people best on metadata maybe based on metadata that the BND gives the NSA there's this thing called signature strikes where the US institutions don't even necessarily know the names of people that they're killing with drone strike they're just analyzing metadata of people that look like a Taliban member a communicator and I say general counsel Stuart Baker said metadata absolutely tells you anything about somebody's life if you have enough metadata you don't really need content well turns out that sometimes you don't really need a trial in the eyes of the NSA in the US before you get shot there there's another thing like there's not only the metadata but the BND also uses humans as an information source and give those information to the US where they can like facilitate this for their drone wars for example they used refugees as an information source and it was this hubby we which is called like the central institution for inquiries and this was a cooperation not with the NSA it was a cooperation with the defense intelligence agency so the military spy agency of the US and there they got the information from the BND but not only this they had those people from the DAA directly sitting in the inquiries of the refugees and at the end as they didn't have enough personal in the BND anymore they also inquired the refugees alone so no control over what's happening with this data and they asked for example like phone numbers and places another investigation that was done into the BND was not by the Bundestag and the inquiry committee but by the federal commissioner for data protection she went to Bud Eibling she only visited a single outpost of the BND and she commissioned a report a 60 page report which was pretty damning but it was classified highly secret so no one was allowed to read it until we published it in full on that's quality gorg and in there and in that report she found out 18 serious violations of laws and the constitutions that the BND was doing only in Bud Eibling these legal violations were and these are quotes from her of outstanding significance and they're in core areas of the BND's actions it doesn't get any more damning than that especially since she's a member of the conservative party and from that she issued 12 complaints like a complaint yeah doesn't sound like much but it's the strongest weapon of the data protection officer of Germany and she said like the BND severely restricted her right to oversight repeatedly and unlawfully she said like that's seven databases but Eibling alone without an establishing order so that the BND would be allowed to run it and that the stored data of this must be deleted immediately and must not be reused so the BND means immediately delete seven databases including ex-keyscore is what the commissioners say now is that actually happening no because then there's other politicians like this friend Schimpansky Schimpansky of also the inquiry committee who said oh yeah that report from the commissioner that was secret but also it's her individual opinion and we have a different opinion and the government will just keep on doing what it did so there's all those things we found out and what does result from this like that's the question we have to ask ourselves and yeah one thing we see that like every scandal around a spying agency resulted in more powers for this agency and what are the other consequences like there was a transparency initiative there was a transparency initiative because like all the cover names of the outposts of the BND were standing on Wikipedia and so the BND said like yeah okay then we can put a metal plate on those buildings which are already standing in the internet another not really that damning result was the exchange of BND's president the CEO president get chindler which was replaced by the new one Bruno Carl but there are more serious results or like more staying results like the BND law so they implemented a new law which has many falls like for example the foreign spy agency inside of Germany is now really officially allowed to be tapping stuff inside of Germany and they are not only allowed like before to request communication lines to be tapped they are now allowed to just request whole networks instead of one fiber up the cable and technically they were legally only allowed to tap 20% of that they cannot have a hundred percent of an entire network which means a BND can legally now finally obtain the full take that it wanted from the date six internet exchange in Frankfurt many many years ago so when I asked politicians about that doesn't that seem like a pretty drastic expansion of the BND's powers and basically they can't do whatever they want they said oh don't worry they don't have enough hardware and money to do what they're legally allowed now but what are the like official targets of the BND what is he like supposed to do we always have this argument of like he's fighting against terror he's investigating terror or war or proliferation but there's yeah if he's trying to spy on Germans but there's other things there's like for example counter-fighting money money laundering and drugs and there's the BND can survey Germans if you suspect them of illegal migration help into the EU like our friends from sea which we're saving lives in the Mediterranean the BND this was from a law change one and a half years ago that we're seeing now against it's not only looking for terrorists but for malware the BND is scanning the dates six internet exchange for DDoS and knew with the BND law so it's now officially possible that he targets the world to retain Germans ability to act or to gain insights of importance to foreign and security policy which means like if you translate it into one single word he's allowed to do anything so it's not just about terrorism it's about political power it's about Merkel sitting at the G20 meeting wanting to know what the Chinese and other partners are thinking and how they're prepared for a meeting that's what Secret Services what the spy agencies are really for but those limits that we said now we're only for so-called for the contents of your communication for metadata there's now officially no limit at all the BND can take full dump of metadata like it has been doing and it's legally allowed to give it to partners like the NSA we don't only have a new BND law we also have kind of a new oversight law which is kind of insufficient like one argument for this is they established a new independent committee but this independent committee is appointed by the government so like those who we learned about that they are not really controlling the BND well and they don't have any not much interest in controlling the BND very well so they are like the ones to appoint their committee to control the BND better the oversight committee said other problems like a push-pull problem there when the directors of the spy agency sit there the members of parliament can ask any question but they don't really know what to ask about what the current scandal is what the hidden things are so it's not like the spy agency go there and tell everything that's going on we had ex-heads of the BND who said well I always had a list of things I could have talked about but they didn't ask the right questions it somehow the time was up yeah but it's not just about us saying like that those reforms are kind of wrong but it's also what experts said in the parliament hearing and many many more people so we have like a short one minute clip like a best of what the experts said in the parliamentarian hearing gezen data and foreign foreign data is almost the same technique it is a device is almost these data the same employees work on it and it is the same department I wouldn't say the reform at their place so not to say because the control of the BND is too weak to fall out the danger is that the BND continues to lead a personal life and mistakes with significant diplomatic and strategic damage can happen the material and legal protection standards are significantly reduced compared to gezen fifth the regulation is systematically unhappy the regulation is hand-to-hand not really good that it is in my eyes a constitutional suicide both those laws were passed and they're entering into force next week with the change of the year but other consequences for the BND are it's getting more money and more resources we were real just last year after Snowden after the inquiry committee that the BND is getting 300 million euros more for this new project called strategic initiative technology where it's getting new fiber optic cable tabs new sigin capabilities new tools for mass data analysis and new tools for hacking there is other funny operations the BND is getting money for like 150 million for crabbing cryptography under the name of anis key and messengers because they noticed like oh we can only like break 10 out of 70 messengers and we want to break everything and everywhere for snowden and they don't use just like yeah technology they also use human intelligence operations to get access to keys and certificates and once again like every spying scandal like we saw results in more powers for the agency at least until now that's pretty unsatisfying now what do we do with that so we need to get active I learn in school and university that democracy is the informed consent of the government well if I'm not informed I can't really consent to what is happening the snowden revelations and the inquiry committee have shown that the spy agencies are in direct opposition to the principle of democracy they're operating in secret and they're not controllable they're breaking laws and breaking laws left and right and with any other institutions it would have been found illegal and closed down and eliminated already wise is not happening with spy agencies but and since that is unfortunately not happening we need to get active in different ways one example is to litigate to sue people I want to sue more people we have some people some examples of that too there is the opposition suing like at the federal court of justice because they want to hear snowden the frankfort internet exchange date six is suing the government for its orders that the internet exchange has to hand over data to the BND now I only learned yesterday that once the new law is enforced and they're getting a new order to hand over data that they're suing on the basis of this new law which is really really good and important our friends from reporters without borders together with lawyer friends are suing the government for surveying journalists and other people of importance for violating fundamental rights still out outstanding amnesty and the society for civil liberties are suing the government for the article 10 law and the society for civil liberties is also suing the government for the new BND law but there is other things to do like besides litigation so we're trying to do our little part and inform the public that's called journalism now not everyone was happy with our work so far we got into a little trouble with the authorities here but we are continuing your work because you are have to find out what's being done in your names with your taxes and it's also about like being creative like looking what can I do best and how can I use this like capabilities to do something against those spy agencies and it's also about like drag the spy agencies to light like show what they are doing it's like about to understand and interpret and I think like in this room and in this building are many many people with technical skills that are like the ideal people to understand what they are doing in a technical way and to look into that and then it's about just informing friends family and politicians like for example if you hear something and like people don't know about it just tell them and make clear to them what's really happening with their money with their taxes now we're at a hacker conference obviously we use technology technology for self-defense now we need to build those tools we need to use those tools that is really important but that doesn't stop there we need also change to need to change the legal basis and society so we don't have to defend our fundamental rights with technology tools and we've been doing that for a few years now I mean that's the CCC's entire point of existence but somehow we don't always get where we thought the world should be there's also a concept of direct action which I've heard that ever after certain recent election results are probably only going to increase now we've seen people we've seen people hack the NSA the BND is running servers on German territory that's big IP we can't really advocate for legal things here but we really would like to see more documents send them to us so much for us thank you very much now we have a QR code with our open PGP fingerprints and we'll hand over to questions hey please stay seated and I will tell dear Vox sorry we're taking five minutes over the time so come up here right here in the middle like the cross instead of now asking questions from the audience because we have to last time who would you like to ask a question yeah we have like this one problem we have this witness who didn't come to the committee and we would like to be able to ask him questions because we have to ask him questions because he's the number one witness who started all this and so we have to ask like what do you think about what happened in Germany after like all those like committee things were coming out and thank you very much guys thank you so much but I gotta say this is CCC you know we're always killed for time so let's let's talk about this quickly and again thank you so much that's probably the warmest welcome I've ever gotten the main question that people ask is first of why was I not invited to Germany to speak about this and I think that's because the truth is sometimes inconvenient and when we look at what you talked about what we're seeing is a response to this a lot of things become clear that actually are never spoken that are never sort of stated clearly out loud to read in the newspaper you see in the magazines instead actions are speaking more loudly more clearly than anyone's words really are and that's what we've seen a story that's been told since 2013 in country after country right this isn't about nationalism forget your flag and think about what's happening to everybody everywhere even in the United States even in Germany even in the United Kingdom although I'm being generous here we're talking about very liberal what we would like to think of open societies we see evidence again again that this kind of mass surveillance right indiscriminate surveillance that's just collecting everything off the wires that's hitting sites like d6 internet exchanges you know telecommunications providers all over the world is there actually not effective in stopping terrorism and yet despite that we see more and more political support not only to continue these programs to expand them as you say to fund them to even greater levels why is that and I think the answer there is clear put yourself in the position of these politicians why would they be afraid of upsetting the United Kingdom of the United States these sort of international relations where everybody is trading baseball cards trading sort of dossiers about all of their citizens private activities or maybe they're saying well we won't share Germans information with you but we'll share the information of everybody else whose lives connects to Germany or trances through Germany and this this is the fundamental basis behind not just mass surveillance targeted surveillance it was never about terrorism because it's not effective in stopping terrorism it's not about security at all it's not about safety at all it's about power surveillance is about control it's about being able to see moments of vulnerability in any life whether that person's a criminal whether they're an ordinary person and we want governments to be able to investigate serious crimes or at least some of us do this is ccc so I can't speak for everybody in the audience but you know if there's a bad guy out there we can get a court order with this guy's name on it and say let's go after them let's tap their line let's go after their modem let's go with the alligator clips outside their house let's go in their house when they're out there we've got a warrant from a court let's look at this person's life very few people object to that but this we're watching everyone everywhere all the time is an extremely dangerous thing and I want to point out here the Germany is standing on the stage of history in a real way because they are the only country that has a real inquiry going on and unfortunately we see they're operating from a position of either fear where they're afraid that they'll lose popularity in this sort of international intelligence ring or favor where they're afraid to upset a friend which is understandable nobody wants to piss off their friends but at the same time there are greater consequences at risk here China just passed an extremely harsh new surveillance in December of 2015 when they were asked why they did this how they could get away with this how they could justify this where it compelled technology companies to help them decrypt communications that were going through their servers they said well this is what every other Western country is doing why shouldn't we do the same Russia just passed their Yara Vaya package which is even worse it's one of the most blisteringly terrible surveillance laws on the planet Russians call it the big brother law this is something that should never be passed anywhere in any country and yet the same kind of thing happens they go well we're just keeping up they're not they were probably doing this anyway but the fact is we are now ceding the moral high ground we're now saying it's okay we're now saying we're not worried about individual rights we're not worried about human rights we're only barely concerned with the rights of people within our borders within our countries with our passports right but human life is not this sort of team sport where we go what color jersey are people wearing human rights are universal even in the United States people go oh well you know this person is not protected by the Fourth Amendment or something like that I've got news for you we signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights we signed the International Covenant on civil and political rights these are international agreements treaty agreements in the United States and if you read our Constitution we have something called a supremacy clause which means our treaty obligations are equivalent to constitutional obligations so yes in fact foreign citizens people around the world also have constitutional protections you don't have to look to the Fourth Amendment we have a mesh of other frameworks and my final thing here just because I know I've gone long is that this isn't just happening in China and Russia right we were always suspicious of them we always knew things were going to happen there they were all going to play games on the internet but it's happening in Germany it's happening in the UK it's happening in the US it's also happening in places like Canada not old news not 2013 happening now this is from the very end of October of this year right and it continued through the very beginning of November where a journalist and in fact many other journalists in Montreal were found to be being monitored specifically their phones were being tracked via their GPS via their tower positions they were being tracked not because they were suspected of any criminal activity but because the police department was embarrassed by the stories they were put out that were sourced to people within the police department so they said well if we track the journalists we can find their sources and then suddenly their intelligence agency said oh people are responding really badly about this maybe we should say that we kind of do the same thing and the Canadian intelligence service said hey we are going to do a report about this to tell you when it happened and why and how and justify it but the unfortunate news here is just a few days ago in this month in December they said we're actually going to take that back we can't tell you that because this is a state secret and if we get into that paradigm of confirming what's happening who's being spied on when and how we won't be able to keep secrets anymore well the problem with this ladies and gentlemen is secret government is necessarily bad government you can't substitute the judgment of a few officials behind closed doors for the judgment of everyone in a country everyone in a nation not in a democracy and we can try that we can even try to work around the boundaries of that we can create inquiry commissions like we have in Germany right now but the problem is we will see fundamentally again and again that paralysis that's injected into our democratic process processes by those natural human inclinations those sort of buffeting wins that we feel on either side of us of fear or favor that the commission is suffering under right now where they go look what's going to happen if we say we broke the law well we might lose power we might lose reach we might lose prestige we might become less powerful we might lose our careers we might lose our popularity and ultimately in democracy whether we like it or not particularly in recent days it seems that a lot of our governments are devolving into simple popularity contests I think in no point is this more clear than in the United States where we just had the most public unpopularity contest in our history but it's not enough to talk about the problems it's not enough to talk about the failings it's not enough to talk about where the inquiry committee is going look we can't talk to these people because the United States might be pissed off if we do that what we're saying is that our principles don't matter our rights don't matter the structure of our governments don't matter our beliefs our values don't matter and if that's the case why are we playing at this game at all and if that's the case all of the restrictions that are put on us in this social contract between the governing and the governed where we play nice in exchange for this vote that increasingly means less and less means we need to start thinking about what we can do directly again everybody in this room is here for a reason everybody has things they believe in everybody has things that they want to learn and we've learned a lot in the last few years but perhaps the most important thing and what I think we need to all be considering with is what can we do we're hackers we see a problem mass surveillance is out there right we can't get to targeted surveillance yet we got a really smart guy who's gonna be on stage next I think Chris Sagoian talking about the targeted hacking but mass surveillance was what I set out to let people know about and how we can contest it but the thing is all I could do is tell you what's going on if we're gonna make the internet safer if we're gonna make our societies more free more open if the generations that come after us are going to enjoy the same rights that we ourselves inherited that people died for you're gonna have to do something about it maybe that's writing code maybe that's creating a tool maybe that's starting a new service or maybe that's recognizing that sometimes you have to say no or vote a different way but you have to take some action it's not enough to believe in something ladies and gentlemen if we want things to get better you're gonna have to stand for something thank you that's so awesome how you work so Anna wanted to wanted to say something to you at the end yeah one last thing because we didn't have time for questions now which is a pity and we want to give you the opportunity to ask us questions and to get in touch and to like exchange opportunities and though you can get like to the thing is called section 9 up there at 8 p.m. and we will be there and happy to share beer and on the top floor all the way over there thank you very much and give them a warm applause