Germany
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Germany asks CIA chief to leave the country over spying scandal
On 10 July 2014, the German government told the senior CIA representative in Berlin, known as the station chief, to leave the country over spying allegations. The decision came one day after German authorities searched an apartment and an office of a German military intelligence official alleged to have been working for the US intelligence. […]
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Germany opens investigation on Merkel’s phone tap
Germany’s federal prosecutor annouced on 11 June 2014 that it has opened a formal investigation into the alleged monitoring of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone by the US’s National Security Agency (NSA). The German government has reportedly announced its support to the investigation. Although Chancellor Merkel has asked the US President Barack Obama in person […]
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Anniversary of Snowden revelations: The year we fight back
On 5 June 2013, the Guardian published Edward Snowden’s first documents. These showed that the NSA was using a secret court order to collect millions of customers’ phone calls of the US company Verizon. Snowden’s subsequent disclosures confirmed what many privacy activists were suspecting for a long time: that the US government and its allies […]
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Artist collective threatened with legal action for Google Nest spoof
At the tech conference re:publica which took place on 6-8 May, numerous participants fell for a hoax by the Peng! Collective. During a one-hour presentation on the main stage with the title “your data, our future”, the artist group unveiled a site called “Google Nest” which mimicked the tech giant’s corporate design. The site introduced […]
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Big Brother Awards Germany 2014
On 11 April 2014 the fourteenth German Big Brother Awards ceremony was held in Bielefeld, Germany. The awards are organised by EDRi member Digitalcourage and the gala was streamed via the Internet and reported by print and broadcast media across Germany. Six “regular” awards were given, and for the first time, a “positive” award was […]
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Facebook subject to German data protection law, court rules
A recent decision from the High Court of Berlin rules that Facebook is subject to German data protection law. The ruling contradicts a previous ruling by the Administrative Court of Appeals of the Federal State of Schleswig-Holstein, which ruled in April last year that Irish data protection rules applied over German data processing, since German […]
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German govt and intelligence agencies face penal charges for spying
Penal charges against the German government and US and UK secret services have been filed on 3 February 2014 by three German NGOs – the International League for Human Rights, Chaos Computer Club (CCC) and Digitalcourage. (Digitalcourage and CCC are EDRi members) The criminal complaint is about mass surveillance, illegal covert intelligence activities, violations of […]
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Action against governmental censorship in Germany
EDRI-member FITUG (Forderverein Informationstechnik und Gesellschaft) launched an urgent public campaign against government censorship of websites. A year ago, the district government of Dusseldorf county in Germany passed orders to more than 80 internet providers to block access from their users to some foreign websites. Providers and civil rights groups united in protest against the […]
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