Filed Under: Criminal

The Chaos Computer Club—Germany’s preeminent hacker collective, founded in Hamburg in 1981 and the closest thing the German tech world has to a functioning conscience—has filed criminal complaints against every member of the federal government. Every single one. The interior minister, the heads of the BND (foreign intelligence), MAD (military counterintelligence), and the Verfassungsschutz (domestic intelligence). And yes, the chancellor herself: Angela Merkel.

The charge: conducting illegal intelligence operations, or aiding and abetting those who did. The CCC, along with the International League for Human Rights and digital rights organization Digitalcourage, argues that the German government actively cooperated with the NSA’s mass surveillance apparatus—violating citizens’ right to privacy and committing what German law calls Strafvereitelung im Amt: obstruction of justice by a public official. The formal complaint is worth reading in full.

They’re also calling for Edward Snowden—currently sitting in Moscow—to be summoned to Germany as a material witness, with guarantees protecting him from extradition to the United States or, and this is a real sentence that required writing, kidnapping by American special forces.

I’m genuinely uncertain whether any of this moves the needle. Criminal complaints against sitting governments tend to go the way of most things that inconvenience sitting governments. But someone has to write it down. Someone has to make the argument in the language of law, even when the law is precisely the thing being violated. That’s what the CCC does. It’s one of the reasons they still matter.