I'm the author of this post. What people who are unaware of the layout of the congress center don't realize is that the video starts when we were leaving. The door "inside" is actually to get "outside". I was told to leave in 5 minutes, I stayed where I was maybe 2 minutes and started walking (I'm not leaving anything out, it was just more of the first audio recording), and then was prevented from leaving the event by masked thugs who pretend to be real security guards on paper.
People assume I did something to deserve this, and I can live with that. But in reality it was nothing more than the list of domain names I own. I did my best to describe that here.
And this is one situation where you can easily distinguish mature, liberal people from hateful radical anarchists. I know which side I am on, I detest political violence and those who condone it.
You may have read me arguing the CCC side in other posts in this thread, but I'd also like to reach out to you and make clear that I very much give you the benefit of the doubt, particularly I'm not gonna assume you _intentionally_ did something.
What's driving my opinion is that an eviction at CCC doesn't just happen because a single person is offended by something you did. There's a whole bunch of people involved in the eviction, and presumably they agreed to some extent that something you did was inacceptable. Maybe there was something you didn't know, maybe drugs were involved, or maybe just something stupid happened. But somehow there was agreement that an eviction needs to happen.
Unfortunately, the CCC has a responsibility for what happens at a CCC event. The event is a representation of them, and so is what happens at the event and what they allow by their social rules. I hope you can retrospectively look at this with a clear head and find out what went wrong.
I don't want to judge who is right and who is wrong in this. Probably everyone involved could have prevented the final outcome of this.
But I think you are wrong with your assumption about the eviction and some other stuff.
Listening to the Audio before the whole incident it is basically said that VC needs to leave the venue immediately, and that they do not want to argue this any further with VC and he can call whoever he wants after he leaves the venue if he thinks he is treated unfair. Even if he had a valid reason to enter or a ticket at that point you have to follow the orders of the people tasked with security or official functions at the venue.
You can sue them afterwards for your ticket price or make a giant fuzz on social media, but if you get asked to leave by someone with authority in the venue, you leave. It's a very simple principle. In the end a guy in the recording even tells someone else to call the police in German. Everyone seems to be calm but fed up with VC, still there was no reason for violence at this point in any form or shape.
So something happened between the recording and the video.
And from the blog entry and the following video it's believeable that VC wanted to leave the venue. Knowing the venue from exhibitions and conferences, it is as he describes, he tried to get out and not back in when he was grabbed by multiple people who he claimed were staff / security. He was heading straight for the door not screaming or throwing punches or anything.
Now this is where it gets a bit complicated.
If you refuse to leave a venue, a professional security company will always try to isolate you and then tell you that the police is on it's way and because you are trespassing now you can't leave any longer. We make it clear to you that you are no longer able to leave because you broke the law and we are pressing charges as soon as the police arrives and that gives us the right to keep you in place and hand you over to the police.
If you do not cooperate we can use the least amount of force that is necessary to keep you in place until the police arrives. You can still phone, film or record as much as you like and nobody will touch you as long as you don't try to run or do anything stupid like grab a knife from your pocket or anything that could harm us. It's also not up to staff to steal your phone or prevent the recording.
So the question is if VC was told that police is on the way and then tried to leave the venue. Which would justify the use of force to keep him there, but not in the way it was applied which was very excessive and unprofessional.
That said, here are just two other pointers that this was not a professional security company or most likely not even people with proper certification.
- Proper security doesn't pull up hoodies and put on gloves to team on someone when they are aware that someone is filming. This looks more like Dodgers Antifa friends. Look at the video in the blog post and then at https://b3b76917eedfeb0c4dd3-af59c7b3e9e42ed4215be8c7a95ca95... and you'll see what I mean. Security doesn't dress this way, especially at any professional event. Who wants to look like a bunch of thugs representing a proper business?
- Proper security doesn't try to snatch an eyewitness phone and then tells them he can do shit "because you can't find me on the internet" after showing her crew sweater and face into camera. What a dumb bitch (personal opinion).
No matter how you look at it. VC has the right to stay unharmed and treated properly even if he broke the law and they are pressing charges. Germany is not an open PVP Zone like Texas. And it's CCCs responsibility to guarantee that people under their protection stay unharmed. Especially by their own staff or external service providers.
this individual shouldn't be allowed in the congress and banned for life. please consider reporting him to twitter too for all the racist garbage he spews https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21914674
Yeah, dude, posting a video of you getting kicked out primarily hints that you were being an idiot of some kind. Occam's razor, simplest explanation and whatnot. Feel free and try to elaborate / prove otherwise.
Also, FYI, CCC team has "Hausrecht" and if they tell you to leave you legally need to leave and they're well within rights to evict you.
IANAL, but you can't physically eject someone from a space in most civilized countries even if they're doing something wrong. Call the polizei/police.
There are exceptions for immediate threat to life, but you can't go wild and start kicking and punching someone for trespassing. That's assault and the video footage is possible evidence that could lead to charges.
I was a bouncer in a previous life, and there were very strict rules to follow after asking someone to leave.
yes, you can. Its called being a bouncer. I did it for 15 years. You don't kick and punch, and the video show quite clearly that the staff were simply trying to eject him.
> Isn't that what this entire post is doing? In contrast, you're saying "oh they kicked you out therefore they must be right".
Sure, it's telling a story from his perspective, and then has some audio and video of the actual eviction. I don't see an issue with the eviction itself and for what happened before it's his word against the CCC. Until further information is provided, I choose to trust CCC over his word.
Does anyone see the alleged political reason in the post? The only thing I seem to see is that he was asked not to come without a message or something, and now got kicked out.
His email service, cock.li, has a very lax content policy, only disallowing spam, illegal content, or general abuse. This has attracted many ner-do-wells (in addition to the plenty of legitimate users like myself). Additionally, he offers addresses on domains such as: goat.si, cumallover.me, horsefucker.org, cocaine,ninja, nigge.rs, hitler.rocks, rape.lol, and nuke.africa. All of these are obviously intended to create offense, which, if his recollection of the events are accurate, is indeed what happened.
>Additionally, he offers addresses on domains such as: goat.si, cumallover.me, horsefucker.org, cocaine,ninja, nigge.rs, hitler.rocks, rape.lol, and nuke.africa. All of these are obviously intended to create offense,
One of these are not like the others. Who gets offended at cocaine.ninja?
this individual shouldn't be allowed in the congress and banned for life. please consider reporting him to twitter too for all the racist garbage he spews https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21914674
I don't know any of the people involved in whatever happened. But this statement is simply not true.
You should not tolerate intolerance. "If a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant".
Some people can and will abuse the "you can't use violence against me under any circumstance" rule you just mentioned to do very bad things.
I would argue that resorting to physical violence to resolve verbal conflicts is quite high on the scale of intolerable things.
> You should not tolerate intolerance. "If a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant".
I have issues with this absolutism. What is "intolerance" or not is dependant of culture and context. Such a thin line that can be so easily moved, and you end up with the moral equivalent of "3 felonies a day". Then before you know it, you get fired because someone deemed that using 'they' indiscriminately is a form of intolerance.
There’s video evidence at the bottom. I casually follow CCC but am not familiar with all the sub-groups /clicks, so was a bit hard to follow. I Hope those who did the assaulting are held responsible and banned
That video shows that... they evicted some dude that seems to make his personal brand about being edgy and annoying? What exactly am I supposed to be outraged about here?
Agreed. Seems like one of those "free speech advocates" that enjoys being as offensive as possible and then howls if anyone tries to take their content down.
The video is definitely not a "brutal assault". If the video is bad or incomplete, after pictures of injuries would easily prove his point.
> Agreed. Seems like one of those "free speech advocates" that enjoys being as offensive as possible and then howls if anyone tries to take their content down.
In Germany, "free speech" is not so deeply culturally ingrained: in the German Grundgesetz, paragraph 5, there is a concept of "Meinungsfreiheit" (freedom of opinion) (https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_5.html) which, even though "sufficient for most practical purposes", does not go as far as "free speech" in the USA.
You can get convicted a very harsh sentence for using just a single word, and don't you citizen dare to use "hate speech!". There is no Meinungsfreiheit in Europe/Germany, it exists only on paper
The congress is a yearly multi-day conference organized at the end of each year by the CCC [0] "Europe's largest association of hackers". Not sure how attendance at bsides style conferences is but I'd figure it's more like Black Hat, somewhere around the 17/18k mark for the last year iirc.
More like DEFCON than Blackhat. Blackhat is a “corporate” conference and expensive to attend, DEFCON and CCC are more community driven and thus affordable.
Did you watch the video that was linked? This wasn't an eviction, they started to physically assault him. Fortunately, it looks like the prosecutor has started a case against the assaulters.
It looks like a bunch of teenagers jumping someone. They don't look or behave like professional security agents.
The bad chokehold one of them was attempting is actually banned from many police forces.
The CrewCrew bouncers are hired as far as I know. Angels don't have a reason to assault anyone except in personal self-defense, i.e. punching someone who's trying to jab a screwdriver into them or similar 1 on 1 assault defense cases.
The gate access control angels are instructed to dial 110 on DECT which connects them to CrewCrew dispatch/triage.
The "they should've called the police" argument is legally wrong in Germany. The allies were pretty pissed off after WW2 and wanted to eliminate the "bystander" excuse for people who watched Jews getting gassed. That's where the "failure to render aid" law comes from. Of course, you're not expected to endanger yourself, but - say, there's an average guy assaulting someone, and you're travelling in a group of 5 reasonably muscular, capable guys... your excuse to not step in is gone.
It doesn't seem that the "aggressor" here was very aggressive and remained largely passive. No laws are absolute and that's what judges are for.
I doubt the "failure to render aid" law in Germany is interpreted as everyone is deputized to enforce every law, everywhere, at all times. There's probably a narrower view on what's appropriate and when.
(More related to the actual events) if someone illegally parks their car in your driveway, you should call the police to have it cited and towed. You can't break the windows and try to move it yourself under normal circumstances. However, if there were a fire and the car were blocking some sort of escape, then sure, break the windows and drop the parking brake to get the car moved.
Again, this is why we have judges and you should call the police in almost every case except those involving grave danger.
I think might be a cultural difference? To _physically_ move someone who doesn't want to be move, you have to _physically_ grab them and move them. You usually do this with multiple people, in case the person might get violent or something.
But I know that in some jurisdictions, just grabbing someone, not to mention moving them, is considered assault.
So there's a conflict I guess? I'm not sure how to reconcile this, just be advised that customs around the world differ.
German law covers this in §32 StGB ("emergency defense"), which includes emergency assistance. If people were reasonably convinced that he was threatening others, they're done & out clear.
P.S.: in German law, it's actually a crime to _not_ render assistance to others in danger - StGB §323c ("failure to render assistance")
German law has extraordinary self-defense statutes, both civil and criminal. The following applies to criminal self-defense:
Any ongoing[1] illegal attack on any legal right may be warded off using force, including insults (that's an attack against personal honor).
The force does not have to be proportional, only necessary (it must not be more severe than another one that would lead to success) and effective (it must have a reasonable expectation of success to start with).
Apart from that there are only minor exceptions (for small children and so on).
[1] "ongoing" is again much wider than you'd think: someone robbing you and running away with the loot? Still ongoing. You following them and striking them down? Still ongoing. Meeting them on the street next day by chance? Not ongoing.
That's for historic reasons, Germany also had a long debate about abortion, and the compromise found was that abortion is illegal, but does not lead to criminal culpability.
According to that, it would be possible to use self-defense for the unborn child against the mother and doctors when she tries to abort.
Obviously, nobody wants burning abortion clinics, and the courts settled on that abortion cannot trigger self-defense.
That's un-principled, and I'm not aware of any legal expert actually justifying it on doctrinal grounds, but it's useful to keep the peace in the debate.
I'm not trying to judge whether whatever anybody did in this specific example (as little as we know) was valid self-defense. I'm just trying to convey some aspects of German law which may be very strange to people from other legal cultures.
For example, whenever I'm reading an article about "the new Texan shoot-first-ask-later law"[1]/stand-your-ground/castle-doctrine I'm very disappointed in the emotional reporting, because it seems so mild and almost pacifist.
That was the very short version, of course. The real legal analysis of self-defense is fascinating, but complex. Just take a look at the table of contents in https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notwehr_(Deutschland)
Interesting, my country has a kind of strange "necessary defence" law - it covers defending something that is protected by lay, not necessarily your own thing - as long as the defence is appropriate.
So you can "defend" someone else, or stop a thief even if they are not threatening you, because you are upholding the law - but you don't get to shoot a thief for example, because that would not be appropriate.
Is this how it works in Germany? I'm kind of curious if we just stolen this from our neighbour.
No, I'm the first person to suggest that (multiple) people believed he was threatening others. Please read carefully :)
It doesn't matter whether he was intending to threaten, or ignorant about the rules, or just stupid. If he leaves the boundary of socially acceptable behaviour (yes this is subjective and established by the community) then he may full well get evicted, and with force if necessary.
On the legal side, a judge or jury would repeat that consideration, and establish whether his behaviour was beyond acceptable for the context he was in. Not by the judge's or jury's social standards, but by trying to understand the situation and determine whether the crowd acted "reasonable." Since there's quite a bunch of people involved in his getting kicked out video, I would wager a guess that there was consensus that his behaviour was inacceptable, and a judge/jury would side with that.
German law doesn't do "I spilled hot Starbucks, now I sue Starbucks for damages". You're expected to have a brain and some level of common sense (or be certified psychologically ill, if you prefer).
Relatedly, the "they should've called the police" argument is legally wrong in Germany too. The allies were pretty pissed off after WW2 and wanted to eliminate the "bystander" excuse for people who watched Jews getting gassed. That's where the "failure to render aid" law comes from. Of course, you're not expected to endanger yourself, but - say, there's an average guy assaulting someone, and you're travelling in a group of 5 reasonably muscular, capable guys... your excuse to not step in is gone.
People assume I did something to deserve this, and I can live with that. But in reality it was nothing more than the list of domain names I own. I did my best to describe that here.