What Counts as Treason These Days

Treason. That was the word the German government reached for in July 2015 to describe what Netzpolitik.org had done—a digital-rights journalism outlet that published classified documents about planned surveillance expansion. Not the agency doing the surveilling. The people reporting on it. The attorney general opened formal proceedings, and the move had a clarifying effect that probably wasn’t intended.

A demonstration went up in Berlin on August 1st—Dorothea-Schlegel-Platz to the Justice Ministry—with handmade signs and a few thousand people who’d decided the situation was worth showing up for. Anna Biselli, writing for Netzpolitik at the time, put the issue plainly: Treason investigations make free reporting an untenable risk for journalists and the outlets they write for. That’s bad for democracy. Because in a democracy, the press must be able to exercise its rights freely and without restriction—without being intimidated. Hard to argue with. Someone in the government eventually agreed, because the proceedings were dropped within days.

The attorney general responsible was dismissed shortly after, under circumstances the official record describes one way and everyone involved understood differently. Netzpolitik kept publishing. The surveillance infrastructure that triggered the whole affair continued operating without meaningful oversight. That’s the ending this one got: the journalists kept their jobs, the apparatus kept running, and the episode became a data point in a longer argument that nobody in power is particularly interested in resolving. A victory, technically. It tasted like one.