[tor-relays] Artikel 5 e.V. - Another police raid in Germany - general assembly on Sep 21st 2024

[Artikel 5 e.V.]

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.