Category Archives: Info

Information about the Netzdemo portal

Netzdemo Wiki still alive

The German-language Netzdemo Wiki was started on 11 August 2008 to document the history of netstrikes, virtual sitins and online-demonstrations and to provide a platform for digital activism and online protest events. Netzdemo Wiki illuminates the contributions of various network activists worldwide and their online activities. The wiki wants to be a place for discussions about practical democracy on the world wide web on topics such as Internet censorship.

The history of netstrikes started in Italy, where in 1994 computers from more than 150 mailboxes were confiscated in nationwide coordinated raids. The crackdown of the mailbox networks in Italy indirectly triggered the netstrikes. In the winter of 1995, administrators of mailboxes, political and media activists met to find strategies for better publicizing their concerns. In 1995, the first ideas for online political activism were developed and implemented. In December 1995, the Italian hacktivist group StranoNet called for participation in the first global netstrike via emails in Italian and English.

It took a while before internet activism became a popular medium for protests in Germany. In March 2001 the anti-rassist initiatives Libertad! and Kein Mensch ist illegal started with the mobilization of an online-demonstration in connection with the deportation.class campaign against the Lufthansa deportation business. According to human rights activists, a total of 13,000 Internet users took part in the protest. Lufthansa had counted a total of 1.2 million page views and announced that the blocking of the booking system had caused economic damage.

Lufthansa and the public prosecutors saw the action as a deliberate coercion and that the call to the online-demonstration was a call to crime. The offices of Libertad! in Frankfurt were searched and computers confiscated – years of investigation followed. The first trial against one of the initiators of the first online-demonstration in Germany ended in June 2005 at the Frankfurt district court with a conviction and a fine of 900 euros. In the days leading up to the trial, the initiative Die Kellerasseln organized a campaign against the expansion plans of Frankfurt airport operator Fraport, to draw attention to this process.

The jurisdiction was rejected by the OLG Frankfurt one year later and the accused was acquitted. Online protest is not a crime!

On July 4th, 2011 a tweet from Libertad! promoted our Netzdemo Wiki:

Currently, the community is working on a new chapter on Digital Resistance about the Electronic Civil Disobedience in the times of big data and mass surveillance in the online and offline world. Feel free to make additions to this growing encyclopedia and help us to expand and supplement the information collection!

Resistance 2018

We wish all of you a happy new year 2018 with militant political successes – also and especially in view of the shift to the right in Germany and in the EU. Together let us openly attack the madness of the capitalist system and its logic culminating in war and environmental destruction!

After the demise of de.indymedia.org in the first decade of the millennium, the now banned spin-off linksunten.indymedia.org was founded in 2008; at first only with contributions from southern Germany and later from all over Germany. We from Netzdemo Portal have relied very much on the openness and popularity of linksunten.indymedia.org. Of course, many of our announcements for electronic disobedience actions have been posted there.

The ban of linksunten.indymedia.org shortly before the election in Germany took place, rings the alarm bells. The ban is in fact an electional campaign – and an image campaign for Thomas de Maizière, who shows off as being the strong law-and-order man towards the right-wing populist party AfD. But it is also part of a broader pruning of basic democratic rights, from face recognition and data storage to the censorship that has now taken place.

You do not need to look to Turkey to know what comes after the ban on left-wing extremists. Once the censorship has become established, more bans will soon follow. The consequences of such a political shift to the right are already evident in some of Germany’s neighboring countries. We as radical organisation say „We are all linksunten.“

Hello community!

Netzdemo Portal has now moved to Blackblogs. Feels good to be in a friendly self-managed environment without the steady threat of having our pages erased by weird self-censorship of private web hosters.

Protests of the Netzdemo Portal target in first line against capitalist projects, that exploit and destroy nature and endanger people. The Netzdemo Portal joined Operation Greenrights on 19 July 2011. Operation Greenrights fights for human rights and green energy and opposes destruction of nature and culture by big corporations. As alternatives to Low Orbit Ion Cannon made by Anonymous we from Netzdemo bring in some protest tools that have been used in earlier actions. The use of VPN is highly recommended.

Right to Online Demonstration: the temporary suspension of a site’s service or the spread of its databases hasn’t to be considered a violent action and it don’t produce an irreparable damage. For this reason, ddos, deface and any other technique that means a demonstration of dissent online has to be considered lawful. Computer tools of dissent are like a virtual flashmob. We can consider the Online Demonstration like the boardings that environmentalist ships do against fishing boats, these can bring some temporary discomfort, but haven’t to be considered illegal.

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