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Hello, thanks for a nice
introduction.
So a lot was already said
to us.
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.
Uh, famous person Edward Snowden
said that he, quote,
sitting at his desk could wiretap
anyone.
And it's like not just think
about the serious things.
It's about really anyone and everyone.
It's about games and pawns.
It's about surveilling people.
Yeah, playing Angry Birds.
It's about surveilling 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 their reaction.
Yeah.
We need it screen.
Yeah, maybe some of the English
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, year
12 of the farm and listen
to Talash belong in Deutschland
is not in Hungary.
The NSA does British
and dangerous ones on Dienst
from this skipped
in Deutschland mean
you're not going to
let some isn't.
It. And then.
Just a few months later, things
came out and Chancellor Merkel
said something slightly different
about this kind of
a tone of voice, I guess I'm
holding of my eye.
It's been tough when the economy
isn't forbidden to talk about
control. But on both
don't even know how it's been a tough
one.
Does it
get garnished? That's a no go.
Yep,
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 I was German
Foreign Secret Service BND would be in
bed together.
Now to the political reactions, what came
like after all those Snowden's
revelations were like
what's written about in Germany,
as have already
mentioned, there was this inquiry
committee established and it's the only
inquiry committee that's.
Yeah, evolved after the Snowden
revelations. So there's kind of something
special about it in Germany.
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 the BND had
great concern that such an inquiry
committee would focus on the activities
of the BND SIGINT division
of looking what the hell would be and is
actually doing. And not only the NSA, the
Q 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.
But now it's almost 2400
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 was a lot of black on
the pages. So this
also the people trying to
kind of get to know what the BND
does together with the NSA and the other
five eyes.
Yeah, 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 chancelleries
and the BND give us your documents
so we can read what you've been doing.
And in addition to reading
the documents, which we are not a part
of, they're the public hearings
of witnesses and experts
in the Bundestag
rooms where we go
to 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 last
night at the very beginning because the
public can come into the building.
The the hearings
are somehow public, even though 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,
government and witnesses
are saying. And that's a
cumbersome word.
So we have printed out the Internet
of what we're doing, and we have about
three folders of
what we wrote in the last one, if you're
standing right here right now and after
the talk, if you're interested in a
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, yeah,
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 and Fondacaro?
Well, witness number one,
it's called Edward Snowden because
it doesn't take a lot of brainpower to
discover that he is an important person
that could reveal information that is
relevant to the committee's
course of investigating what the
secret services are actually doing.
But as you probably heard, there was a
huge fight and political fight.
He hasn't been 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 very low
chance, if even that he will actually
be heard by the committee
and that makes people not
believe in the seriousness anymore.
And Glenn Greenwald, who wrote about
many of the documents, told the German
politicians 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 that, Glenn also
didn't come.
So what did we actually learn from all
those documents?
Press releases, this statement
and the witness hearings?
Well, first of all, being
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 are doing similar things.
They're doing mass surveillance in
of the digital world.
And also the Germans of my
agencies, like the others, are
extremely bending or sometimes
plainly outright breaking the
law.
If a few of those funny
theories they make up and for
example, there's satellite interception
and satellite interception, there's
like basically a limit set
by the law. And the BND 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 armed 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 with the
law. And they I think
the worst thing on this is 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 uncomfortable in
here, they thought about like, how could
we explain this?
So the theory is in Bavaria
and but Aveling, where the station
with the Radames 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 Dessaix
housed hosted. And the BND is saying,
yeah, well, we're surveying fiber
optic cables on German soil from Germany
EXPE.
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 even funnier.
We can translate it to the functionary
theory. And it says that
if you are in a function, if you are
German and you are in the foreign country
and working for maybe the EU
and yet 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 where we learn about a
few operations 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 Icona, 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.
And the weirdest part is
they always said, yeah, we're only
surveying foreigners, we're only
surveying terrorists.
So you might say, OK,
Frankfurt in an exchange that's maybe not
so foreign, but then on this
Internet exchange, there's many cables
from carriers coming together
to 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 break.
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's one operation you are not
even allowed to say the name of.
It's like Glutamic.
And it says
that the last three letters like I
see are if you reverse them
at 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 Verizon Verizon.
And they're the tapped, allegedly
phone and fax communications
to another operation that we learned
about in the inquiry committee, although
we always suspected it
was when Close Landfilled
came to the inquiry committee and told,
yeah, well, after Operation
Icona and tapping
the Internet exchange in Frankfurt from
Deutsche Telekom to be, they came again
and said, OK, now we want to tap
the big Frankfurt Internet exchange.
And then close was in the inquiry
committee. He said, well, to be in he
came and basically demanded a full
take.
They wanted everything of all the
things that could possibly have all the
traffic that could possibly be routed
by day six.
Now, after some legal back and forth,
it was clamped down a little bit because
of legal 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 check your
cables, they went to this
to the Internet exchange and said, we
want all traffic that comes to you
from this German
provider.
And there is the other operation, which
is called Monkish Shoulder.
And there a spectrum that it's
called after a whiskey.
And it's operation between
the GHQ, 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, OK, it's getting a bit
too hot in here.
So and then it gets murky.
The inquiry committee was able
to investigate the ancient operations
I Canal and Klatell like without being
able to say the name gloater, like they
always said to say hello.
But from the other operations, we
somehow found out that there's another
operation called Warp Drive, which the
band does together, which with the NSA
and another partner.
But we don't know which one.
We don't know where it went.
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 of 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 the operations
of other countries and there might
be many, many more.
So, but the black ones here, we were
revealed this list of the operations the
German spy agency BND is doing.
But the blackout's even the members of
the inquiry committee are not allowed to
find out what the hell that actually is
that the Secret Service are doing.
They are supposed to look into this
ancient and by now I'm bored
of operation.
I cannot Anglo Tike and more interesting
stuff of what's 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, eh, 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. It's Operation Icona was such
a thing where the BND
went to an 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 it be Andy 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 this is
a tool and it has
kind of the nickname and this 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 appling by the BND since 2009
and had a predecessor that runs
since 2007
and it's also deployed in other posts.
But we have like a
kind of murky
testimonials about this that are running
at least in test mode.
And this kind of thing, 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 when during the Snowden revelations,
when the name X Questcor 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,
those Americans, they're doing really
fancy stuff there, but we would never do
that. But the inquiry committee
found out that for years and years, the
BND has been using the exact
same tool and the exact same way.
Another tool that even goes beyond
what the NSA is doing is
a tool called verus.
That's a tool being developed together
with the German armed forces, the
Bundeswehr, and
it gathers metadata, communication,
metadata of who communicates when
with whom, like classic data retention
stuff.
And special thing about
this tool varices 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 one of the first hearings
being the witness said, oh, yeah, we're
retaining like six types 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 the so-called six degrees of
separation that every human on
this planet knows, every other human
over six cups 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,
10, 12 hops.
So I get slower, but it gets the system
gets slower. Yeah.
So this was one of the things it was
pretty interesting
for us that the BNP is not limiting
metadata at all.
So not as being a hack or con.
We wouldn't have gotten our talk accepted
if we didn't drop some formerly
nonpublic information.
So we have some fear 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 chinning in here
and it's two million metadata
a day and a retention time
of 10 years like 10 years.
But eyeballing one of the most famous
outposts of the BND in Germany
is collecting five million metadata
every single day and just retaining
that for three months.
Ryan Hosein, another
outpost's, it's collecting 15 million
points of metadata every single day and
is retaining it for six months
gobbling and 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 it's retaining them for an entire
year.
And Pulla BND,
Centrals, BND HQ as
of now is collecting an additional 20
million points of metadata every single
day and retaining them for 10
years.
And this is unique because
as opposed to the other outpost before,
this is collecting 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 has it been doing with this
metadata?
Does it keep this metadata?
No, it doesn't.
To do.
But they keep it. But
then there's a number and that's the
metadata per month pushed directly
to the NSA. It's like one point three
billion metadata monthly.
So it's not it's sitting on a server and
the NSA can query it
and gather this data and then pushes
it onto a server directly to the NSA
hardware.
So metadata
is taking by every single communication
on a communication line that the German
spy agency is tapping.
But apparently content
of communications, like the contents of
emails or phone calls, are only
selected, which is what he's like.
You proud a big fishing net
with some of those communication types,
identifiers like
browser ID's.
Most typical ones are IP addresses,
email addresses, stuff like that, phone
numbers.
But there they get way more detailed.
It can be credit card numbers.
They can be cookie identifiers.
There's many types of selectors.
And if communication
is hit by selector, then it's stored
away somewhere for further processing.
Now, how many selectors do we have?
The B? India has 14 million selectors
that come directly from the NSA.
The NSA is giving the BND 14
million selectors that the BNP is running
in existence and its systems
and trawling
the communication lines it taps for.
And of these, forty thousand
were found to be against
so-called German or EU interests
after to be looked into.
What the hell 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
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.
It's 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.
No, they're not the most likable
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 electors like they should
investigate what the BND was doing wrong
and 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 who 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 chancellory, like those who
are kind of responsible for all the
wrongdoings. Also BND and
he wrote a 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 and white parts
of his report.
So only because of the inquiry committee
will be and itself found
out that it has 40000
thousand of the NSA against German
European interests.
So the committee said, OK, now that you
discovered this because of us, we want to
see them. Right.
But the chancellor chancellor,
your office said no.
A committee, but also other control
committees.
Pretty much no one except the chancellory
to bend itself and the
special person, we're
allowed to see them.
So the opposition in parliament and
the so-called G10 commission, we're
suing the federal government
to be allowed to have a look at those
forty thousand selectors that
are known to be against German
and European interests.
But unfortunately, both of those court
cases were struck down, one
on us for
more reasons, one of formal reasons, and
one because they didn't
really have standing, unfortunately.
So no one is going to be able to see them
until someone leaks something.
But there is not only NSA selectors
that the BND using the BND, also using
selectors on its own interests.
And sometimes they even take, like the
NSA selector, see that they are kind of
interesting and just put them
into their own list of selectors.
It's three thousand three hundred.
And
you could suspect that if they're being
use the selectors, they are in the German
interest, but.
Even those the vendors who himself
are against German and EU interests and
at least three thousand three hundred
that are against those interests, there
are many more, but we can only see those
who have been deactivated after those
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
spying on EU institutions, the
commissions of member states.
And for example, like we said before, our
commissioner of
the BND is spying on NATO and
fellow NATO members
and on the International Monetary Fund,
the BND spying on the Internet, National
Criminal Court at The Hague
and its spying on the World Health
Organization, its spying on OPEC,
the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries, and spying on the
United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF,
for Christ's sakes, it
being is spying on a United Nations
Office on Drugs and Crime UNODC.
And those are just the selectors
for someone that you want
to 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 to the beat and it
spying on John Kerry
and Hillary Clinton as she was like
the minister of foreign affairs.
And he 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.
And the BND says, like the filter out
all the German communications, they have
a filter system that they called
the office, 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.
It's 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
yet another phone because you may be
living in a foreign country, then you
have bad for you.
They also sought out like domains
like Dot d.
So if you have like a Google Mail
dot com address, yeah, that's a pity.
And then 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 kind of try to hide
your IP address and they
say they filter out stuff when the text
is spoken. In German, we got something
we got like this bycatch is 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 they throw it away.
So they always say this filter works.
Then I went to a member of the
governing coalition and said, look, we
have a dark domain, communicate in
English and I use a VPN and Tor,
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 naturalistic dialog, 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
Illuminatus trilogy.
That filter
is not only it's not really an invention
of the B, and I always say, oh, it works,
the filter works, we're filtering out all
Germans and we even have a certification
where you gave it to the federal Office
of Information Security to be assigned
and they certified it as it works.
But when asked for the inquiry committee,
the guy who actually did that,
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 frickin manual
and decided that it sounds like 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 knows what what it really
does that counts the 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 ninety five
percent, there were numbers like ninety
nine percent. 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 ninety
nine percent, 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 group. 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 Ramstein,
and we had like a witness
and the inquiries, which was Brandon
Bryant, a former drone operator, and he
said Hammerstein's absolutely essential
to the US drone program.
All the information and data goes through
Ramstein 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,
If we kill people based 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 Taliban
member communicator.
NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker said
metadata absolutely tells you anything
about somebody's life.
If you have enough metadata, you don't
really need content.
Well, it turns out that sometimes you
don't really need a trial in the eyes
of the NSA in the US before you get shut,
that there's another thing,
not only the metadata, but the BND
also uses
humans as an information source and
gives those information to the US where
they can, like, facilitate this for the
drone wars.
For example, they used refugees
as an information source.
And it was this Hobby Lobby, which is
called like the Central Institution for
Inquiries.
And this was a corporation not with the
NSA, it was a corporation 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 DEA directly
sitting in the inquiries
of the refugees.
And at the end, they didn't have enough
personnel 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 was done into the
body was not by the
Bundestag and the inquiry committee, but
by the federal commissioner for
Data Protection.
She went about eyeblink.
She only visited a single outpost of the
BND and she commissioned a report,
a 60 page report, which is pretty
damning, but it was classified, highly
secret. So no one was allowed to read it
until we published it in full.
And that's political work and in their.
And in that report, she found out 18
serious violations of laws
and the Constitution said to be and was
doing only about eyeballing these
legal violations word, and these are
quotes from her of outstanding
significance and in core
areas of the BND 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.
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 to right to oversight
repeatedly and unlawfully.
She said, like, that's seven databases,
but eyeballing alone without an
establishing order so that the BND
would be allowed to run it.
And that's the start date of this must
be deleted immediately and must not
be reused.
So to be any meeting is to immediately
delete seven databases, including
XKeyscore is what the commissioner
said. Now, is that actually happening?
No, because then there's other
politicians like this friend
Pensky, she pensky 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 this 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
the 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 outpost of the BND
were standing on Wikipedia.
And so the BND said, like, yeah, OK, then
we can put a metal plate on those
buildings which are already standing in
the Internet and then they're
not really.
That damning result was the exchange
of BND president, the old president
Shindler, which was replaced by a new
one, Bruno call.
Their most serious results are like
more staying results, like the BND
law. So they implemented a new
law which has many
flaws, 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.
So instead of one fiber optic cable and
technically they were legally only
allowed to tap 20 percent of that,
they cannot 100 hundred percent of
an entire network, which
means BND can legally
now finally obtain the full take that
it wanted from the Data six Internet
exchange and Frank for many, many years
ago.
So when I asked politicians about that,
doesn't that seem like a pretty
drastic expansion
of the BND powers?
And basically they can 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.
No,
but what are the, like, official targets
of the BND? What is it like supposed to
do? We always have this argument of like
is fighting against terror or he's
investigating terror or proliferation.
But there's Germans.
Yeah, if he's trying to spy on Germans,
but there's other things
like, for example, counterfeiting, money,
money laundering and drugs,
and there's the big indications
of a German if you suspect
stem of illegal migration,
help into the EU like our friends from
Sieverts who are saving lives in the
Mediterranean.
Ngobeni this was from a
law change one and a half years ago that
we're suing against.
It's not only looking for terrorists, but
formalwear.
The BND scanning the Internet exchange
for DOS
and knew of a law.
So it's now officially possible that
he targets the world to retain
German's ability to act or to gain
insides 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 and
it's about political power.
It's about Merkel sitting at the G20
meeting wanting to know
what Chinese and all the other
partners are thinking and how they're
prepared for a meeting.
That's what Secret Service is, what the
spy agencies are really for.
But those limits, we said now we're only
four.
So for the contents of the 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 law, we also
have kind of a new oversight law, which
is kind of insufficient.
Like one argument for this is they
established the 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 body
well, and they don't have any not much
interest in controlling the BND very
well. So they are the ones
to appoint their committee to control
the better.
The oversight committees had 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 X heads just being
who said, well, I always had a list of
things I could have talked about, but
they didn't ask the right questions that
somehow the time was up.
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 of what the
experts said and the parliamentarian
hearing it has it is a quantities
of guns and waterboard for five
days speaking out in.
And it's because I'm tired of for
fastenings me.
I'm Z2 Cliff.
We hadn't gittin and I wasn't I was not
enough. I deserve attention because
it's anger that fast
is EDM by the hour by one.
Does this deserve our title.
It's really the uniform and the U.S.
is only fops she finally
control it. Is being that an outfit
to get Faibish. Did does that being the
right thing? And I can feel it on
film being diplomatic and
I is a shot in
the matter.
You're known for fans.
You can shoot stunts aren't in fact,
to getting a heat
from Streelman systematic
do Klipsch.
Do you think this handoff
could assist in my now
sports as well as we sweetmeat?
Both those laws were passed and they're
entering into force next week with the
change of the year,
but other consequences for to be NDR,
it's getting more money and more
resources.
We were just last year after
Snowden, after the inquiry committee,
that the BND is getting
three hundred million euros more
for this new project called Strategic
Initiative Technology, where it's getting
new fiber optic cable taps,
new SIGINT capabilities,
new tools for mass data analysis
and new tools for hacking.
There is other funny operations of India
is getting money for like one hundred
fifty million for QuickDraw would
be under the name of an this 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 every person
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 and 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 learned in school, in university
that democracy is the informed consent of
the governed. 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 are not controllable.
There are 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.
Why is this not happening with spy
agencies?
But 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 to.
There is the opposition swing like
at the Federal Court of Justice, because
they want to hear Snowden.
The Frankfurt Internet exchange
is suing the government for its
orders that the Internet exchange
has to hand over data to the
BEA. And 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 in 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'll keep continuing your work
because you have to find out
what's being done in your name 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 crack
the spy agencies to light, like show what
they are doing is like about to
understand and interpret.
And I think like in this room and in this
building, many, many people who have
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 let people don't know about
it, just tell them and make
clear to them what's really happening
with their money with the Texas.
Now, we're at a hacker conference,
obviously, we use signal
technology technology
for self defense, and 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 to
need to change the legal basis and
society so we don't have to defend our
fundamental right with technology tools
and.
We've been doing that for a few years
now. I mean, that's the 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 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 running servers
on German territory.
That's big IP.
We can't really advocate for illegal
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
BGP fingerprints and we'll hand over
to questions.
Hey.
Please stay seated
and I will tell divorc
sorry, we're taking five minutes
over the time
to come up here, sit
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 committee things
were coming out and like.
Instead of giving standing ovations.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, guys.
Thank you so much, but I got to say, this
is C.C.C.. 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 all, 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've talked
about, what we're seeing as a
response to this, a lot of
things become clear that actually are
never spoken, that are never sort
of stated clearly out loud that you 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
twenty thirteen 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 and again that this
kind of mass surveillance, indiscriminate
surveillance that's just collecting
everything off the wires, that's hitting
sites like Internet exchanges,
telecommunications providers all
over the world, is they're 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 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 transits through Germany.
And this this is the fundamental
basis behind not just mass surveillance
of 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 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 not 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 that 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
twenty fifteen 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.
And they said, well, this is what every
other Western country is doing.
Why shouldn't we do the same?
Russia just passed their YORO via
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
OK. We're not 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, this
person's not protected by the Fourth
Amendment or something like that.
I've got news for you.
We sign 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 the 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 U.K., it's
happening in the US.
It's also happening in places like
Canada.
Not old news, not twenty thirteen.
Happening now, this is from
the very end of October of this
year. 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 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 of 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 the 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 that paralysis
that's injected into our democratic
processes by those natural
human inclinations, those
sort of buffeting
winds 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 the point is this more clear
than in the United States where we just
had the most public unpopularity
contest in our history.
It's not enough to talk about the
problems. It's not enough to talk about
the families. 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
against everybody in this room is here
for a reason.
Everybody has things they believe and
everybody has things that they want to
learn.
And we 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've got a really smart guy who is
going to be on stage next, I think,
Chris, to in talking about
the targeted hacking.
But mass surveillance was what I set
out to let people know about and how we
can test it.
But the thing is, all I could do is tell
you what's going on if we're going to
make the Internet safer, if we're going
to 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 going to 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,
we're 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 going to have to
stand for something.
Thank you.
That's so awesome how you work,
so I know what to do.
I 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 a question trying to
get in touch and to like exchange
opportunities. And though you can get to
the thing, it's called Section nine
up there, that's eight
p.m. and we will be there and happy
to share your thoughts on the top floor
all the way over there.
Thank you very much.
And give them a warm applause honor.
I'm ready. Myself and St..