Hello to all list-reading entities!
On Aug 16th 2024 German police considered it once again appropriate to
raid the home&office at the registered address of our organization. The
first raid was 2017. There are obviously still people working in German
law enforcement today, who think that harassing a node-operator NGO
would somehow lead to the de-anonymization of individual tor users. At
least that is what they claim in the paperwork.
As with the first time, the raid team was fortunately a bit better
educated and acted significantly more reasonable than the non-technical
people applying for the raid and the judge signing it off. So again, no
hardware was seized. Apart from one burnt (middle relay) node and some
billing paperwork for the exit node this was all about, the team left
the house after one and a half hours with mostly empty hands. We intend
to legally challenge the search warrant to make sure that this does not
happen again (but this is not what this email here is about).
These were once again one and a half hours with armed police in a
personal living room, threatening to de-facto kill a livelihood and
software business (carrying a truckload hardware away) of an non-profit
board member to force cooperation.
As a consequence, I am personally no longer willing to provide my
personal address&office-space as registered address for our
non-profit/NGO as long as we risk more raids by running exit nodes.
That is a risk I am just no longer willing to take anymore.
Artikel 5 e.V. is now calling for a general assembly on Sep 21st 2024.
We are looking for new board members (who take over and organize a new
registered address and keep running exits) or discuss ALL alternative
options. These options include "just stop running exits" or even the
most drastic step of liquidating the entire organization and
distribution of the remaining budget to other German organizations (that
would have to qualify under our non-profit by-laws).
Assembly time&location details can be found at
https://artikel5ev.de/
We intend to provide a stream primarily for our members but also for
interested parties who can not attend in person. The event/stream will
however be in German only. Details for the stream will be made available
on the website on short notice before the event starts. If you plan to
attend in person, an upfront email would be appreciated, so we can pick
the right room to set things up. Thank you!
Regards,
Gero Kühn
for Artikel 5 e.V.
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