On June 20th 2018, German police searched the homes of board members of our
former fiscal sponsor Zwiebelfreunde in a coordinated raid. Zwiebelfreunde
(_Friends of onions_ in German) is a non-profit organization that supports
privacy and anonymity projects and operates several Tor exit nodes.

They are not accused of a crime but considered to be witnesses in a case: the
operators of an anonymous website calling for protest against the far-right
AfD (Alternative for Germany) party convention used an email address at
Riseup, a privacy-friendly email provider to which Zwiebelfreunde facilitates
donations.

During the search, computers, storage media, personal items, bank account
records, and paper receipts have been confiscated. This unfortunately means
that if you have donated to Tails before October 18th 2017 using our European
bank account, your data is now in the hands of the German police (IBAN account
number, name of account holder, amount, and date). If you donated after this
date, you donated to our new fiscal sponsor CCT and not to Zwiebelfreunde.

According to Moritz Bartl, one of the board members, "_there's a long history
of police using that kind of data to investigate social structures; who's
working where, who's involved in which projects, so we have to assume that
they are looking into the social networks of people_"
([Source](https://www.zdnet.com/article/german-police-raid-homes-of-tor-
linked-groups-board-members/)).

The raid has been strongly criticized by [German
media](http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/hausdurchsuchungen-bei-
netzaktivisten-chaos-computer-club-kritisiert-polizeivorgehen-a-1216463.html)
and [digital rights activists](https://netzpolitik.org/2018/zwiebelfreunde-
durchsuchungen-wenn-zeugen-wie-straftaeter-behandelt-werden/) as being
[disproportionate](https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2018/hausdurchsuchungen-bei-
vereinsvorstanden-der-zwiebelfreunde-und-im-openlab-augsburg).

Please join us in supporting our friends at
[Zwiebelfreunde](https://www.zwiebelfreunde.de/). We are very grateful for the
support they have provided to Tails.

Read more about the case and find links to international press coverage on
[Zwiebelfreunde's blog](https://blog.torservers.net/20180704/coordinated-
raids-of-zwiebelfreunde-at-various-locations-in-germany.html).



URL: https://tails.boum.org/news/zwiebelfreunde_raided/index.en.html
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