Marcel Winatschek

The CCC Takes on Merkel

The Chaos Computer Club filed criminal charges against Angela Merkel’s government. Against Merkel herself, the interior minister, the heads of the intelligence agencies—BND, MAD, Verfassungsschutz. The charge: they’d been collaborating with the NSA on mass surveillance, violating citizens’ constitutional right to privacy, obstructing justice.

The CCC and some human rights groups made the case explicitly. The government hadn’t just known about American surveillance operations—they’d been actively helping. And now they wanted Snowden brought in as a witness. Bring him to Germany, protect him from extradition and kidnapping, let him explain what the government had been doing.

The beautiful thing about it was that everyone knew it wouldn’t work. The government wasn’t going to prosecute itself. No court was going to demand the US hand over a man they were hunting. You file the charges anyway, though—you name it, you make a record, you say publicly that you know exactly what happened and you’re not pretending otherwise.

I doubted it would actually accomplish anything. Turned out I was right.