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).

The raid has been strongly criticized by German media and digital rights activists as being disproportionate.

Please join us in supporting our friends at Zwiebelfreunde. 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.