Alexandra Lieben 0:00

John,

Welcome everybody. Let's get started. A few more people might be walking in, but that's all right. Thank you for joining us for a great talk with Ronen Steinke. Thank you very much for being here. He's an Honorary Fellow at the Thomas Mann house, but that's not the reason why he's here. He's German legal scholar and an award winning investigative journalist who works for one of Germany's best newspaper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and as legal affairs editor with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, he frequently writes on German politics and society, particularly on the rise of the extreme right. He co edits an annual report on right wing extremism in Germany. Holland spent six years researching Germany's domestic intelligence service, known as the agency for the protection of the Constitution. His book on the topic was a best seller in 2023 it sparked a wide debate in Germany. Hoenn holds a doctorate in international criminal law, and aside from being a journalist, has taught law at Frankfurt University since 2023. Thank you for being here and talking really about the work of the Agency for the Protection of Constitution and if it's effective and the right thing to do.

Ronen Steinke 1:13

Yeah. Thank you so much. So very timely. I mean, democracy is teetering on the other side of the Atlantic, and I'm here, there's some dramatic news also here on this side of the Atlantic. So I think it's very important and timely that we discuss what are wise approaches to defending democracy, what are maybe unwise approaches? And I want to kick this off by telling two stories, and then maybe that exemplifies the issues that I have more than than explaining legal doctrine at length. So there's a member of parliament in Germany who sits in Parliament as representative of the Left Party. They're called the Left Party. They are, depending on how friendly you want to be, a post communist party or a social justice woke party. They're not a party that advocates Gulags or anything like violent but they're a party, of course, that advocates for socializing medicine, for socializing big corporations. So of course, they have a, they have a an approach to capitalism that is different from mainstream. So this is the this is the party. He's a member of parliament. He's in the public spotlight. He has an absolute clean common rap sheet, so there's no no crimes to his name whatsoever, ever. The only thing that you can take issue with, depending on your own politics, is that maybe you don't like the politics of this person, but he's elected. He's a member of parliament. What he did was he, he wanted to find out what the domestic intelligence service, like this sort of the FBI of Germany, has in their files about him. And he's, he's a lawyer by training, so he knew what, where to write, and how to write these things. And you have a, you have a right in Germany to ask, please, tell me what you have in your files about me. I want you to, you know, put your cards on the table, and they and they answered to him, very polite. And there's a, you know, you get a letter, and there's a person signing it with a name with a telephone number we can call if you have questions. And they explained to him, yeah, we have a file on you since your 17th, since you were 17 and and what are these things that they have on file about him? Well, when he was 17, he used to be an activist with a left wing youth group, and in a left wing, like a magazine, he wrote articles advocating for abolishing school grades, which I'm sure we can agree is outrageous. I mean, if at age 17, you don't have an issue with grades, then I would be distrustful of a person, but that's kind of seems normal to me. And the other thing that he was kind of charged with, is that he advocated for decriminalizing cannabis, and this was in the like in the order in the 90s. So in hindsight, I mean, even in Germany, we've kind of loosened our attitude towards marijuana by now, and it's not seen as a sign of extremism for people to advocate for a more pragmatic approach to drug enforcement. And the third thing was that he had, he had demanded the the draft, so the conscription for military service be ended. So back in the 90s, we used to have on it, also in the in the arts, we used to have mandatory conscription for all males. And this was ended in, I think, 2011 2012 and until that time, the left were basically and maybe the greens were the only two small parties who advocated for this. And so the domestic intelligence service put it in their file that this radical is asking for these radical ideas. Today. In hindsight, I think it's it's obvious that, I mean, no party in Germany is advocating for a reinstitution the total conscription, the way we used to have it, with every male being called to the to the barracks for for a year or some time like that. And so it's a position which is shared today by conservatives, by center left people, but from the perspective of this, of this institution, this secret domestic intelligence service, that was enough to label him as a radical. So I'm, as Alexandra kindly introduced me. I'm a legal scholar in my country. I teach at a university in Frankfurt. I'm also, if you know, to use a excuse, my French part of the political elite. So I get to sit down a lot with ministers, with spy chiefs, with politicians, with members of parliament, to debate their politics, not because they are curious what my advice to them might be, but because they want my approval, because my writing, my editorializing, has a lot of residents, so they many people read it. So they want, they want to make their case to me. And when it comes to this attitude of the German security apparatus and the German domestic intelligence service towards how do we label groups as extremists, and what do we do with them? I'm in a minority position. So the positions that I will advocate in this hour go against the grain, or go against the majority of what you would hear in the political elite in Germany, most people agree, be it in the academic sphere, be it in the political sphere, in the media also that this is a good thing. It's a good thing to have a watchdog, to have a domestic intelligence service which is very mindful of extremism, and which has its eyes and ears everywhere, and which keeps tabs on extremists. And the reason why I was really, really grateful for the chance to talk to you is because I'm curious to find out whether the reservations I hold might make more sense from an American perspective than apparently they seem to make from a German perspective, and what I can contribute maybe to your discourse. I'm sure I know that the debates here are very serious and they're very, very, very pressing about how to protect a democracy from an authoritarian takeover that comes from within and not from from the outside. What I hope I can contribute is a case study, because a couple of years ago, a colleague of ours, Cynthia Miller Idris, who's a sociologist in American University in Washington, came to Berlin, spent a few weeks there, and we discussed a lot about anti radicalization or de radicalization programs. And the US at that time, at least, started to get into that a lot. And the Biden administration invited my colleague, Cynthia, to come to the White House and present her concepts. And it was all about inoculating the general public against extremist narratives. It was all about, well, picking out youths who might be susceptible or might be vulnerable to to extremist ideologies, and kind of working to get them, to get them away from that. And I again, from my minority position, I caution Cynthia and I argued, be careful what you wish for. Maybe now is a nice time, and we have President Biden in the White House, and now you can institute this infrastructure for combating extremism. But there might come a time when the same infrastructure is used by people who have a different understanding of extremism. Extremism is a fuzzy term, as fuzzy as it gets, at least that's my my argument,. The idea of having a watchdog, the idea of having the state look out for extremists, even if they don't break the law, even if they don't commit crimes. It's an idea which, in theory, makes a lot of sense, coming from Germany, a country which descended into fascism, as to quote Levitsky and ziblatt, not with a bang, but with a whimper, because Hitler, To cut a long story a little short, was elected and largely came to power with legal means, with a majority who wanted him. It presents us a very clear example for the danger of authoritarians coming into Parliament through the front door legally and then using this access that they have to our democratic institutions to bring with them some gallons of petrol. And slowly, slowly, they bring more and more gallons of petrol inside, and then they burn the whole place down, or they close the front door and they say, Okay, now we're inside. Now nobody else comes inside anymore. Mussolini in Italy is the same. Is the same historical case. So, so it makes a lot of sense, learning from that history that there should be some kind of institutionalized watchdog. There should be to continue that metaphor. There should be somebody checking your bags at the door to see if you have any petrol canisters in your bag. And if not, then Okay, you go inside. And of course, that watchdog should be somebody neutral. Should be a neutral arbiter. Should be somebody who doesn't play favors, who doesn't look at your personal politics. Just looks whether you are aggressively going to shut the place down, because that's something that you cannot be accepted, no matter what political direction it comes from, whether you are a left wing or a right wing absolutist or authoritarian so that in theory makes a lot of sense to me. The problem begins when we ask ourselves whether it's actually possible to have a neutral arbiter, because so the the metaphor of petrol in your in your bag, to translate that into less into less haptical terms. The question is, do you have extremist ideas in your political thinking? And that is a question which, depending on your own perspective, you will have a different answer to so a conservative can make an argument that any shades of socialism, and be they soft, shades are like a, like a, it's a. They, they like a slippery slope to communism, and they might believe that, and they might have historical cases that prove that. And then, on the other hand, you could make the opposite argument, and you could say that any person who is willing to put the interests of capital or of the interests of big money, of corporations over civil rights of people, that's the same slippery slope. So there's many examples of people pointing fingers at one another and calling this guy extremist, or that guy an extremist, and the left wing Member of Parliament that I was just alluding to five minutes ago is a great example of that. There's people in the in the domestic intelligence service who really believe that they really believed, at the time when they wrote these things in his file, that this is a this person is dangerous for society and and I think that we need to face the the fact, in my opinion, that whoever you put in that powerful position of being the the watchdog is always going to be somebody with an agenda, and even if they don't admit it to themselves, those are the people with the most dangerous agendas. Usually, it's not possible. There's no litmus test. It's not like a like a physical thing that you can explore. Okay, we put this ideology in a liquid, and if it turns out blue, then it's obviously authoritarian. And if not, it's not, it's always a question of your own preconceptions and of your own prejudices. Maybe so, so no one is neutral. And I wouldn't hold it against anybody that they're not neutral. I think it's it's not possible to be entirely neutral. And that makes this whole concept of having a watchdog a problematic concept, because that watchdog is always going to be is always going to be partisan. He's always going to be named by one political side of the aisle or the other, and he's always going to be more prone to pointing the finger at either leftist or right wingers or kind of realizing his own or her own ideology. So second story that I want to tell, and then I'm very happy to take questions and to open it up to a debate. A second example is a very recent example of the right wing party that we have in Germany, which is on the rise, very worryingly, in my opinion, they are now at 20% we just come out of a national election three or four weeks ago. So they had about 20% which is a huge chunk of the of Parliament. Now they are, if you ask me, and if you ask many, many other people, hardcore and willing to break rules to achieve their goals. So this is not like Marine Le Pen, which is also troubling enough, yeah, Marine Le Pen in France, if you look at her xenophobia and her willingness to break civil rights, but this is a party in Germany which is, in addition to being xenophobic, to being racist, also a party with disregard for the rules of the game, if they see a chance to break rules, and there's examples of that, and if they see a chance of joining forces with or with violent Nazis on the streets, then they would take that chance. This is a very worrying party, my opinion. So to the credit of the current leadership of the domestic intelligence service, they also see this as a danger. So that's where there's no disagreement, at least with me. I'm not going to argue that, because they're not neutral. They're never right. They in that, in that regard, we I have no I have no disagreement with them. They agree that this right wing party is a huge danger, and they are very actively trying to to highlight this, and to to sound the alarm that this party is really dangerous to democracy. So how does it work in practice? It works in practice that in a way that the Minister of the Interior, who is the boss of the interior of the domestic intelligence service, asks his agents his agency, to write up a report on this new party, guys, I need a report. I want to know, are they extremists, and what arguments can you make, pro and con? And then they go, and they spend about a year collecting info, listening, collecting human intelligence, signals intelligence, writing up an analysis. And then they presented in 2019, a memorandum of 1000 pages to the Minister of the Interior. Bottom line being, this is indeed a party which is extremist, ie anti democratic, or dangerous to democracy. And the minister started reading this. And the minister at the time was himself a member of the the right fringe, or the the right wing part of the Conservative Party. So he was also somebody known to be very tough on immigrants, and known to be very vocal in his in his concern that Germany is taking in too many refugees. And he took a lot of criticism for that. So he starts reading, and he and he's curious to find out, okay, what are the arguments against against this new right wing party? And he sees that his agents are saying, well, one of the one of the pieces of evidence to prove that this party is indeed anti democratic, is that they claim and openly say this as a slogan, that Islam is not compatible with German culture, and so the agents, and again, this is a point where I actually agree with these agents. The agents said that's inacceptable. You cannot say that. I mean, either you have freedom ofreligion or you don't. You cannot say that one culture or belief is incompatible with being a citizen or being a person with full civil rights. That's if you accept that, then you're kind of saying goodbye to democracy. So they, they said, So, Mr. Minister, respectfully, we argue that this party should be, we should warn again. We should warn this should be. We should sound the alarm. But the Minister, I think, must have, like, choked on his apple studio because, because that was word for word, a slogan which he had used in his own campaigns. As I said, this was a minister from the Conservative Party, the TSU, for those of you in the know German party politics, who also, in some of his campaigns against Angela Merkel, who also conservative, but a lot more moderate, he was arguing, ah, we should. We should be, you know, more distant, and we should be more stricter against these Muslims and against all this diversity. And so that was word for word, a sentence, which he had also used in interviews in the press. And so he went back to his agents and said, Guys, we can't do this. You can't use that as an argument to say that they're extremists. I mean, that would infer that I'm extremist also and and the agents, instead of saying, Well, yes, sir, that's kind of what we... ah, you've kind of understood something here which that would have made sense to me. They said, Okay, sir, of course, you're the boss. And I wrote a book about, book about this, and I showed this in great detail. And so they went back and they revised this memorandum, and they toned it down, and they cut the relevant, relevant parts of the of the memorandum, and they returned four weeks later with a new memorandum which had other arguments, or less arguments. So what do I want to what point do I want to make with the second story, even if the the political analysis of a domestic intelligence service is flawless, or at least from my perspective. In that case, it was absolutely there's no, no criticism from my side, unlike in the case of this left wing politician, even then, I have reservations whether that's a good system to have, essentially a government controlling what is considered as extremist and what is considered as not extremist, it makes it possible for the government to always just paint point the finger at the majority, thereby painting itself as more virtuous than it is, and allowing itself to kind of deflect this criticism of our democracy is in danger towards the opposition. And I think that we as a public and we as a citizenship, we deserve better than that. We deserve, or we should. We should insist on the fact that dangers for democracy, dangers for our democratic discourse they can crop up in different parts of the political spectrum. They can come up in the government in part, in parties that are considered mainstream. And maybe these kind of extremist attitudes are more dangerous if they come up in conservative or mainstream parties, because then they're already on the side of those in power, and not just on the side of the opposition. So, yeah, so that's the issues that I have, and I'm very curious to hear if you have questions.

Audience Member 1 21:14

I'm going to follow up. I just want to be sure I understand your position, so let's agree that the domestic intelligence service shouldn't be policing ideas, but do you think it should be policing planning of violent acts, planning of political crimes, and looking to understand and deal with cases in which people are basicallysubordinate to some foreign government. They are working with the Foreign Intelligence Service because it seems there are serious threats within Germany. And the real issue isn't whether they should be looking at what people think and what people say. Here it's easy because we have the First Amendment, which, well, it used to be easy. Now it's getting more complicated, but at least there is that division between freedom to speak but not freedom to organize coups or violent kidnapping, other kinds of crimes.

Alexandra Lieben 22:23

So, yes, so maybe a good way to differentiate between what you called thinking or speaking and actual plotting is to remember the phase of McCarthyism, where also this distinction wasn't drawn, and we're also people were being sanctioned or being in one way or another, harassed for what they were thinking, not necessarily their nefarious or violent plans. So of course, it's necessary, and probably more necessary than it was for a long time to to be mindful and to be alert to people plotting violent coups and those kind of things. So we've a couple of instances where these kind of coups have been uncovered in Germany over the last five years. Have been really shocking, and it's I have I think they could do more. Don't think they should do less to combat that. Also, espionage. Espionage in Germany, like in most countries, is a crime under the Criminal Code if you're caught spying or, you know, bidding, doing, somebody's some, some other government's bidding, that is against the interests of your own country, China, Russia, that's the crime in our in our law books also, and people are put in on trial for it. So that also is something that, yes, we need a police we need some kind of law enforcement institution to do that. We need them to, well, do the usual processes to bring things to court, not to do them in secret. But of course, they need to be able to investigate quietly and not knock on front people's front door. They, of course you need to have the chance to wiretap phones to detect these kind of crimes. But that's a different thing than than targeting legal political activity and legallystanding up as a candidate for office with the platform, which, maybe from somebody's perspective, is extremist. If we allow a government agency to do that, that opens a kind of worms, which I think Germany is a warning example of right now. So maybe, maybe an example, just to show the lengths to which it goes. We we've got a very, very active environmental movement at the moment, I'm sure, in the US, also young people stand up against the destruction of the Earth atmosphere, and who protest against new power plants being built and against cars and domestic intelligence service aligned with the Ministry of the Interior, says that because they are radically anti capitalist, or because they argue for our whole economy to be turned upside down and to be decarbonized. That is too radical, and that would not be possible without kind of breaking the rules and whatever.And so we have situations where, again, people who are 17, 18, 19, who are teenagers who want a better planet and what don't want, they don't want to suppress other people. They don't want to authority in an authoritarian way to take away people's rights. They from their perspective, they want to preserve people's rights and people's livelihoods, and they're being targeted by agents. And that's also some cases. I'm not making it up. I documented some of these cases, and they're young people who were given business cards by agents and told, call me up. I've seen that you have some problems with the police. Maybe I could make it go away if, on the other hand, you would then snitch on your friends. These are things that these are kind of techniques that we all know when the government works against organized crime, and I have no reservations against the government using these kind of techniques when it is against organized crime, that is really a crime, that is really violence, but to use those kind of techniques to kind of, well weaken and kind of stop political activism that is displeasing to the current government. I really have my doubts whether we should be doing that, and that doesn't mean I'm naive. Yeah, I realize that people can go into parliament with clean hands and with a clean rap sheet and still be a danger to us all. But I'm concerned that allowing the government to determine who these dangerous people are and not maybe a medicine, which maybe it's not more dangerous than the disease, but it's going to cause new issues that we should be careful to.

Can I cut in my I have a question regarding freedom of speech, because I'm I'm wondering how people are the German public is actively aware of the existence of this agency. What happens when they get on lists? What are the personal consequences of being on that and does it stifle their speech?

Ronen Steinke 27:44

So the whole apparatus is huge. That's the first thing that many people don't realize in our country. So just to give you an idea, like the US, like most countries, we have a Foreign Intelligence Service like the CIA. Ours is called BND. They spy in China and South Korea, North Korea, but also in South Korea, all over the all over the globe, and they do that with 6000 agents. That's much smaller than the CIA, but that's just to give you an idea. And the domestic intelligence service is larger than that. We have 8000 agents to spy just on German citizens or people within Germany. 8000 that's a big number in a country of 80 million, if you think how many big cities we have, like 100 100 or 150 cities of like, more than 100,000 people.That's that's like a that's like 80 agents per city. That's a lot. And what do they do? They sit in offices that are not labeled, so they are undercover. The I've been to some of these offices, usually they have, like an an invented company name. It's like some kind of software company or something. And they go inside, and then they look like software engineers, and they have their shirts and their jeans, and they go and they work on their computer, and then the neighbors that live or work next door have no idea what's going on. They think it's just a normal company, and then they might sit next to them at the restaurant for lunch. And what they're doing behind those doors is eavesdropping, you know, using their computers to hack into political groups, opposition groups, activist groups, and checking out what their what their internal discussions are all about. So I think Germans are not aware of the the vast size of this whole operation. Usually they're not really concerned, or they're not really so they don't share my my my concern on my reservations to the same degree. Maybe the reason why my book was was was widely shared and widely received, because it was new to many people. Yeah, that this operation is that is that large, and what actually happens? So of course, people don't get put in jail for thought crimes. Of course, that can't be the consequence. You can you can be put in jail for for crimes that are in the Criminal Code, but you can't be put in jail for extremism, which is not a crime and which is not a completely precise legal term. So the consequences are a much lighter touch. What they do is they let you know that you're being watched. How do they let you know? Once a year they have a press conference. So the domestic intelligence service, they have a spy chief who is a known figure, and he's a public person, and he will go on TV once a year and say, Oh, this past year has been very busy, and the AfD, the right wing party, has risen, and they have this number of, I think 49,000 members now, and this and that is going on. And then we have the left, and then we have the like the Coronavirus deniers and all these different groups. And he will, and he will present a long, long list, and it will be published in hard, soft copy on the internet, a long list of groups, and you can look up whether your group is on there also. So that's the first step of letting you know, careful, we're watching you just a second. So, so if you're, if you don't care, and if you're very self confident, maybe, maybe you'll, you'll not change your attitude. But some people might start to worry whether that's a good thing to have that on record. And then the next thing that happens is, if you, if you realize that you are on that, on that list, your political group, your activist group, will be treated differently in terms of taxes. So all the tax benefits that activist groups can usually get, you know, if you have an environmental group, you don't pay the same taxes as a corporation. You have to pay all those tax credits. Tax benefits are gone. And if you have a group, for example, you've been doing environmental activism for many years, and suddenly the government decides that you're now considered extremist. That means, from that day on, your you have to pay a lot more taxes in it, and it can become expensive so the government has, you know, it's a chance to dissuade you from from going that path and maybe taking back one of two of your positions and and then lastly, it's not just something that kind of dissuades the members of these groups from being becoming very vocal or becoming very, very anti government is also something that dissuades other groups from cooperating with these groups. So for instance, as a voter, do you really want to give your vote to somebody who's been put in the books as extremists? How will your peers think about that if they hear that? Do you really want to to cooperate with one of those extremist groups. Say there's a big demonstration against racism, and like all the activist social justice groups from the city come together, and there's a there's a wide umbrella of groups, and then maybe two or three of those groups are deemed extremist by the government. Maybe the other groups will say, Ah, it's kind of tricky. It's kind of makes us look bad, maybe better if you do your own demonstration without us. So there's all these kind of subtle mechanisms that isolate these groups, and that even though nobody's put in jail and there's no handcuffs or anything, it does have an effect.

Audience Member 2 33:18

And this is just based on ideas, no actions?

Ronen Steinke 33:22

No so the ideas and the people have to have a so the claim has to be, your ideas are extremist, plus, there's a danger of you realizing those ideas. So if you're just an academic, that's wrong. Academics have a lot of influence and impact if they have students, of course. But if you're just somebody who writes novels that nobody reads, maybe they will say, okay, that doesn't but the moment that you are actually being active and trying to influence, then they will say, yeah. And if you, if you're innocent in a criminal you know, if you have a clean rap sheet that doesn't buy you any anything.

Audience Member 3 33:59

You kind of almost turned a different corner from where I was, but it sounds like the panopticon. I'm starting to think Foucault, and you're getting this external surveillance that is modifying behavior, and it's what is acceptable and what is not acceptable is determined by this neutral body. That's not neutral, because we're affected by our contexts. What I was wondering, too, is like, you know, retro, you know, most of the time we say, oh, you know, Europe is so much older, but actually our democracy is older than most European democracies. So, you know, put it into a different context I'm really worried about today. So almost anything I say feels like it's going to backfire because of the current political context we have. But it's the courts that are supposed to be actually one of the major checks and balances to protecting democracy. So we, you know, in in the absence of having this in the United States right? This, this, this domestic intelligence group, we had the government set up with its checks and balances. And the democracy, democracy was supposed to be protected primarily by the legal system, so I'm sort of moving back into it doesn't seem to be working as well as it was supposed to, and we're in a very dangerous place. So I think that although this is dangerous, working from the point of ideas, we're losing the place of the legal system protecting us. And so you know what? What do you think would be an alternative in protecting, let's say our democracy, which I think has some Ching, some major keystones that are currently failing us, that we're not seeing maybe quite yet in Germany.

Ronen Steinke 35:58

Yeah, so I would draw the same distinction that you were alluding to before. There's a difference between thoughts and actions, and I think there's no reason to be naive or to be tolerant of actions which cross a line. I don't care what the ideology behind it is. If you storm a house of parliament and kind of take it over by force, that's a problem, and that's that should be treated accordingly, accordingly. So if we and that's a distinction which, that's a determination which can be made by courts, and it's not necessarily a political determination, because it doesn't have to rely on the ideology of people with the pitchforks. It can rely entirely on the fact of pitchforks in front of Parliament. So I think that's where the system of the courts need to be vigilant. Um, my impression is they're not very vigilant, or not vigilant enough in this country, or not successful in that regard. Yeah, they're being, they're being they're being stopped by the executive branch in our country, also, I think they could be more active. So there's some calls for for having the the Constitutional Court, like the Supreme Court of Germany, take a sharp look at these, this new right wing party, which, as I said, My issue with them, and I think many people's issue, is not just that they're right wing. I mean, that's that would beobjectionable but legitimate in a democracy, but my issue is that they're right wing, plus ready to use violence, and that is something that that courts should be able to determine and should be able to look at. And right now, I'm one of the people who argues that we should really give our Supreme Court a chance to determine whether they're crossing the line with their methods and not with their thoughts.

Absolutely.

Audience Member 3 36:11

I think that's where you said that it was a complete disregard for breaking the rules, which is different from thinking about, you know, having radical thoughts, but that's, that's also part of what this group looks at as well, right? Yeah, so, you know, I mean, I'm not, I'm not, I don't think it's a good thing. I think it could be abused and used by whomever is in power. It sounds very dangerous, but I was also concerned about the idea of breaking the rules of the game, because the democracy is only as strong as people who are willing to play by the rules.

Audience Member 4 38:13

Thank you. I'm curious, because so from what you've described so well with the German interior Secret Service. How that compares to the US context, and I'm thinking of the Department of Homeland Security, because I remember a couple of months ago, Alexander the Burkle Center organized this really interesting talk with a senior official with the Department of Homeland Security, and the way they described their mission sounded very similar to what you just described, keeping touch on potential extremists, actually having agents on big demonstrations or rallies filtering through online forums and stuff like that. So I feel like, is there already similar system in place in the US that's just like differently located within the US government?

Ronen Steinke 39:15

So officially, not So officially, the idea freedom of speech is a lot, is a lot more respected in this country. The Officially, the idea is that they only focus on actual crimes, actual breaking of laws, of which, if we have the context of domestic terrorism, there is enough to look at people actually building bombs. That's what you should be focusing on, not people kind of, yeah, manufacturing some, some theology, which, which could potentially lead him to do stuff. The the case that I looked at in the in the US was the the situation of the FBI, approach to Black Lives Matter so black lives matter as a social justice movement, which is in very strong opposition to many of the government's policies and law enforcement. They were they were targeted with the claim that they are kind of the breeding ground for domestic terrorism. And that's where it gets murky. That's where kind of, what people are saying, what people are ideologically thinking was was taken by the FBI to kind of make the claim that they're one step before actually taking violent action. But at least they drew the line to at least they made the claim that they're close to violent action. They didn't just make the claim that their thinking is radical or too extremist. So I think that the German approach is still distinct from the American approach. We are the way the system is set up in Germany right now, they're completely free. They don't have to prove that there's any proximity to actual violence, whereas here at least, they have to make that claim, whether they do it in good faith or not. I'm sure that's debatable often.

Audience Question 5 41:07

Thanks. I think the last point you made is important, because it does show a significant difference in preparation, so to speak, and at what point intervention is happening, although I'm curious about one thing, and that is that the the apparatus of information gathering that you're describing for on the side of the police is a long, slow moving apparatus of gathering information. But we've seen with Trump, for example, that he doesn't really need that apparatus in order to effectuate many of the same actions against the his enemies at the moment. So, for example, in your in your tax example, he doesn't need an apparatus that will, you know, work for years to give him the information that x company affirms dei or something, and he's going to give it, he's going to keep it, he's going to take away their tax status, their tax exempt status. So with the rapid deployment of information in the landscape that we have now, it's not difficult for the government to just sort of do it instantly, as opposed to having an apparatus that does it over the long term. So I'm just kind of wondering, is this kind of an archaic apparatus on some level, compared to the apparatuses that we're seeing deployed in the United States at the moment.

Ronen Steinke 42:27

Yeah, maybe it's a slower, slower thing, like slow motion, of the same of the same concept. That's at least the way I would I would probably describe it, agreeing with you. Other people would maybe say that to have it legally controlled and have a long, slow process, that's a lot better than having a king wake up one morning and say, That's what should be done. I think, I think in both cases, yeah, whether it's spontaneous or rapid or whether it's slow and builds up over many years. What I take issue with is the the arbitrariness of the judgment that is at the core, which is we label this as extremist because we believe it is extremist. Don't agree with us. Well, that's just the way we see it. There's no like scientific objectivity to that. And that is something that, even though, as I was mentioning with the in regards to the right wing party, I agree with these judgments, and in many other regards, I also agree with these judgments, yeah, not with all of them, but it kind of goes counter to my idea of what my relationship to the government should be. And it is deeply unsettling to me that I could wake up with a new government. They would find these same instruments, and they could use these same instruments to label other people extremists, maybe just to give an example that is really quite, quite extreme. So right now we have a fairly moderate leadership of the domestic intelligence service. They are like the top guy is a conservative. He's a member of a party, by the way, which also we should mention, is kind of not the way a neutral arbiter should be. He's a member of the CDU, of the party of the that now won the election. So he's not even making appearances of being neutral. But the person who was in that position until 2018 was also a member of the CDU, so of the Conservative Party. He got kicked out in 2018 because there was some disagreement between him and the government, and since then, he's gone down the rabbit hole and turned into a complete right wing conspiracy theorist. He's on X all the time, and on Telegram, and I follow him still, for old times sake, he's really, he's really gone, gone nuts. And it just goes, it goes to show. I mean, it's possible that you put people in position. Yes. And I mean, I'm glad they kicked him out, but if they hadn't kicked him out, there's this these instruments are dangerous. To have an instrument where people are allowed to eavesdrop and to to to go against citizens, just for their ideas, without the checks and balances or the court saying, Wow, please show me the statute, the criminal statute that this person is breaking. That's a dangerous situation to be in. To give you some some examples. So just because we were discussing about protests and Gaza, I think before the movement to boycott, divest and sanction Israel, for instance, which I'm sure we can disagree on whether that's a wise approach and whether that's anti semitism by another name, and that there's a long debate to be had here, but I don't think we can seriously disagree that they are non violent. The approach that they're that they are suggesting is, let's not advocate bombing busses in Tel Aviv, but let's advocate economic I don't want to say economic warfare, economic measures, boycotting, not buying stuff, which is absolute. So I don't think that we can seriously make a case that that is criminal in any way, whether it's wise, whether it's hateful, we can discuss, but it's not criminal. And yet, we have a domestic intelligence service which recently labeled them as extremist.

Audience Question 6 46:27

Quick question about going back to one another, questions about foreign agents. I know what we see in America, at least, is that it's sometimes you're sometimes able to identify disinformation, or like, foreign bots or agents by the amount of extremism that you're finding in the in their posts and in their feeds. And I know there was some just as more of an expert on this than I am, but there was some articles a few years ago showing kind of comparing, like actual posts, and then posts that were done being done by foreign agents and interference that were, like, just amplifying and becoming more extreme. And like, the goal was to divide the country more into, like, make either side more extreme. Like, that was the ultimate goal of the disinformation campaigns. I was wondering, is there anything like that in Germany that's happening today, and is that something that these government agencies are tracking as well, or is it really all domestically grown?

Ronen Steinke 47:21

Yeah, so that it's an interesting there's an interesting story about that, actually, because So yes, we have the same problem. Yeah, we have these sock puppets. So these kind of avatars, 1000s of them, these bots that behave like a fish swarm, and suddenly they all go one direction. And it's obvious that somebody is sitting in St Petersburg on a big computer and directing them, and they all have these funny names with lots of digits at the end. I have many of those followers, so especially since Elon Musk took over x, I mean, maybe you've made the same experiences. So, so we have that problem. And what does the government do? The government in Germany, the the domestic intelligence service in order to get in those echo chambers and to to enter those those those groups, and to see what people are discussing. And not just on the open social media, the public parts of it, but also you have telegram groups which are closed. You have and signal some chat groups that are closed, and the government wants to get in there, so they have hired their own kind of avatars. So there, and I've I sat down with one of the young female agents. She started psychology, and that's now her job. She joined the force, she joined the agency, and her job is now to mimic a right winger and to to make friends in the in the online world, not with bots, of course, but with real humans, in order to detect where is somebody becoming dangerously radical, what are they thinking? What are they talking and she has to play that role, because you can't just hack yourself into all of these groups. You have to have people point you, invite you. So that's her job. She has, I think, four or five characters that she plays, and she explained it to me, like, like, like, like a fear, like, in the theater actress that has several roles in the in a repertoire, and they have these that they take photographs, and they post photographs, and it's, and it sounds like a like a like a like a funny job to have, until you realize that, of course, she has to play along, she has to also bite spew some hatred. And if she wants to play a right wing and to be accepted into those groups, she has to say some really racist stuff on the web. So while you and I share the concern that the web is full of increasing amounts of hatred, it's also a fact that some of that is coming from government agents, at least in my country, and I'm very conflicted about whether that's a good approach to policing.

Audience Question 8 49:53

So in your previous example, you had mentioned how this agency produced this report, and then the director read it. And didn't like what was in there, so they modified it. But at least like the US context, there are agencies that produce these reports, policymakers, decision makers, don't necessarily have to read them. They don't necessarily have to act on them. So I just curious, in terms of like the work that this agency does, the assessments that they produce, how much obligation is there to actually act on? What is in them? Like you mentioned that sometimes they go out and say a list, and that might have some negative consequences of people choosing to avoid a certain group or something, but like, what are the sort of major, I guess, assessments where they would actually be required to feel pressureto change the assessment.

Ronen Steinke 50:47

So automatically, by law, the tax status goes bad the moment that you on one of these lists. Also you're not able to get funding from the government. So there are rules stating that tax money cannot go to extremist groups, which, you know, in theory, makes a lot of sense, but in practice, it can be, sometimes be surprising, who's on these lists, so it has an immediate effect. And because that's the case, because there are these rules in place, the government directors, the ministers, they want to see these reports before they are finalized. And so once they are once they are published, then you have to act on them. That's by law. That's the case. So what they do is they want to see them before they're published, and they want to censor them, and they want to, yeah, and have a say, which kind of caused the whole independence of this watchdog into question.

Alexandra Lieben 51:46

I have a question, and that is, for you as a journalist, what's the role of journalists in Germany, right, with so much opinion floating and subjectivity, if you want, and punditry and commentary and disinformation, misinformation is like, is the is your role as a journalist is like the harbinger of truth, the person who sort of tells it as they see it for the benefit of the population?

Ronen Steinke 52:15

Yeah. I mean, the simple answer, which I'm sure is not German in particular, is, you know, speaking truth to power. But then the it's not simple, because speaking truth is a very complicated concept and and increasingly, the debates that we have in within our profession are, you can also distort truth without actually telling a lie, but just by curating the news in a certain way. So you can have a news outlet which reports every day about crimes being committed by refugees without ever telling a lie. It's a big country. There's lots of refugees. Of course, you can find these reports every day, and if you put that on the front page every day, are you lying? Well, technically, you're not lying, but are you distorting and are you kind of painting the wrong picture? I think you are. So that's the debates have become a lot more three dimensional. And I think, and I think rightly so, and we've, yeah, to give an example, we've been debating a lot about when, when crimes have been, when we report about crimes, should we mention the nationality or the ethnic background of a criminal? There's a strong argument to never do that, to say, well, crime is crime. It doesn't have a gender or ethnicity. But then there's a the criticism that we often receive that the media is often the level against the media is that, oh, you're kind of, you don't want the public to know the truth. The truth is that 90% of crime is committed by minorities, by immigrants, and we should be allowed to hear this truth. So the attitude that we're taking, at least in my newspaper, is to kind of say, Okay, let's be more transparent. Let's show them that, in fact, 90% is grossly exaggerated, and we have nothing to hide. And let's portray crime in a way that is proportional to reality. Let's not focus entirely on crime committed by immigrants, for example, but let's do it in a proportional manner, more or less, and sometimes even it can be valuable to counter racist prejudice to highlight the ethnicity of somebody involved in a crime. For instance, if the person who stopped a robber or a terrorist was a Muslim, and we've had those cases where it's actually valuable to teach the hateful parts of discourse to open their eyes to the fact that you know, maybe you should, you should check your your prejudices. So those are the kind of waters we're trying to navigate right now.

Audience Question 9 54:55

So I was really interested in your example of young people being surveilled. And I was kind. Thinking about Tiktok, and kind of the relationship between how, you know, recently, when Tiktok had been shut down, you know, an effort of the Biden administration, a lot of young people were very vocal in our country about not caring that their data is being sold to China or used in China stored. And so I was kind of interested in how, kind of, maybe an extension of Laurie's question, like, I guess, in this information economy where a lot of people are aware that their information is being monitored by the government that is being sold, you know, exists in some tech bubble. You know, the response of the German public to your research, is it that they don't realize how big the information infrastructure is, which is surveilling them? Or is it that maybe people feel that it is too big now that there's so much information out there about themselves that they've put out and just kind of the relationship between the social media world in Germany? What? What your thoughts on that?

Ronen Steinke 55:56

So I think that's actually a big difference culturally between our two countries. I think that people in Germany are much more distrustful of social media companies, and they're generally of private companies harvesting their data.They're much more careful what data they share. Dates of birth, for instance, and my date of birth on Facebook is something 1928 and I get like, a happy birthday to my 195th now, yeah, birthday, and many people do that they share wrong information because they don't want Zuckerberg to harvest their personal data. And maybe that kind of concern isn't as widespread on this side of the Atlantic,that goes along with a general high sensitivity for privacy and for and on the other hand, when it comes to the government, I'm sometimes baffled by the level to which people the degree to which people are relaxed with the governmentsurveying or snooping on them. And often I hear the sentence of, I have nothing to hide. What are they going to do? I have nothing to hide. I always tell them, Well, if you have nothing to hide, why do you have shades in your bathroom? Why do youwhy do you have curtains in your house?So maybe that's a bit the other way around here. I don't know.

Audience Question 10 57:21

Sorry, no, I was just curious why you are in the minority with this idea. Because, you know, from, you know, coming from our my perspective, this would be horrible to think that I was being watched in my you know, activities, or, you know, coming home and angry one day and becoming particularly radical for a moment, and then, you know, I just wouldn't want to be watched. You know, I find it difficult I lie about my birth date on Facebook and all this. I don't even have a social media account because I'm avoiding it. But this would be particularly disturbing to me, and I'm finding it hard to understand culturally, why it's not,

Speaker 1 58:05

especially after you. So the chunk

Ronen Steinke 58:08

So the chunk of the population that is being watched is not a huge chunk, the people being labeled as extremists. It's the people who ascribe to this right wing party that I was mentioning and to left wing groups. And in terms of numbers, it's not millions and millions of people, it's social justice activists. Do they have a big lobby? Do they have a big group of millions of people who love them? Not so much. They're the avant garde. Maybe, if you want to be friendly, they're the trouble makers, the I don't know in this country whether a majority has a lot of love for the Black Lives Matter movement, for instance, and if the government here, if the FBI takes a strict approach against the Black Lives Matter movement, whether that kind of will lead people to criticize the FBI very much. I think the general approach by the majority in Germany, and that's not just the people who who maybe not as educated about it, but also in the political elite, is that, okay, this, this is the fringes of the of the political spectrum. This is the the right and the left. And we should, you know, we should. We should not let them. We should not be naive, and we should not let them cause trouble, and we should be and we are not them. And I think that's kind of, yeah, it's easy to become them. That's my point also, yeah, exactly. Thank you very much for a really interesting conversation. Thank you all for joining us today. Thank you.