Comment raids on net activists
Targeted intimidation
Armed police search the flats "Zwiebelfreunde" even though they are witnesses. That they were not summoned is scandalous.
A LAN network is illuminated
The collective Riseup provides communication infrastructure and has supporters around the world Photo: reuters
You have to imagine it this way: the police are at your doorstep. House search. Why? You are a member of a club that collects donations for Google. And on a blog calling for protests against an AFD party, there's a Gmail address as a contact - so you know who runs this blog?
Of course not. Just as little as the members of the association "Onion Friends" need to know what exactly happened, except that the provider is not Google, but Riseup. It is questionable that the members will be brought to witness the appeal as witnesses. The fact that witnesses are not summoned, but armed police searched their homes is scandalous.
For the decision of the Bavarian police, there are several possible explanations. None, however, suggests a particularly constitutional self-understanding of the authority. Actionism could have been one reason - because no one was successful in identifying the blog's authorship, the homes were unceremoniously searched by cumbersome people associated with the trial.
For the Bavarian police that would be one of the more flattering explanations. Because documents of the association and other organizations located in the searched rooms were confiscated on a large scale, the victims suspect another purpose of the measure: to learn more about the activists themselves.
It would not be the first time that alternative rooms are searched for flimsy reasons. And since the G20 summit a year ago, the repressive measures against left-wing infrastructure have increased significantly, especially in smaller cities. As long as the security authorities in this case do not contribute to the clarification, they must submit to the suspicion of deliberate intimidation.