Enemy of the State

1,444 words

A new project that has been started in Germany by journalist Aya Velázquez is Wir beobachten zurück, “We’re watching (you) back”. The one being watched back is the Verfassungsschutz, short for Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – Germany’s domestic intelligence service.

Aya Velázquez’s claim to fame is her harrowing documentary on the Corona Expert Council and the publication of the unredacted Covid files of the Robert Koch Institute that informed German health policies during the pandemic. (Needless to say, the RKI works closely with the World Health Organization.)

But what is going on with the Verfassungsschutz now? Well, Velázquez learned that she was being observed by our domestic spy agency. At the time of her inquiry, more than 800 entries on her had accumulated in the Verfassungsschutz database. Not only that, as part of the operation, all her known contacts – her potential network – were being watched as well.

Velázquez decided to take action. Since the tools she had used for making her inquiry were not accessible to the general public or were insufficient for the task, she built her own, and this is what Wir beobachten zurück is all about.

Aya Velázquez explained the project in a recent video. You can watch it with auto-generated English subtitles, but when I tried that option, the results weren’t that great; entire passages were simply left out. So here’s my translation of the relevant background information:

Since 2021, the Verfassungsschutz has a new phenomenon area, “Delegitimization of the state relevant to the protection of the constitution”. This category includes so-called state “delegitimizers”, i.e. people who, in the view of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, disparage or question our free democratic basic order.

The video then cuts to a speech by Thomas Haldenwang, President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution:

These are people who, without belonging to left-wing or right-wing extremist groups, are clearly  – clearly – pursuing anti-constitutional aims. They want to overcome the state, they want to resist this state, they want to create a different system, and this crosses the red lines of our constitution.

Velázques continues:

The new phenomenon area was created within the agency, i.e. it never passed the Bundestag as an official law.

By law, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution has the task of monitoring anti-constitutional efforts. Anti-constitutional efforts are attempts to remove the free democratic basic order. However, the concept of delegitimization, which the Office for the Protection of the Constitution has more or less invented itself, sets in much earlier, namely with opinions that the Office believes could one day lead to such efforts.

According to the 2023 report on the protection of the constitution, 1600 people in Germany are being monitored under this new category. No one really knows how many there really are, because in addition to the target persons, the entire social circle is always monitored as well. This new form of mass surveillance was made possible not only by the introduction of the phenomenon area itself, but also by a new law on the protection of the constitution, which quietly and secretly passed the Bundestag in 2021. …

A Verfassungsschutz whistleblower recently contacted the Schwäbische Zeitung.

This courageous man, who was responsible for the management of informers at the agency and therefore knows his way around relatively well, said some very interesting things to the newspaper.

“What was legal criticism yesterday can be a reason to be targeted by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution today. Suddenly, attempts are being made to discredit, demonize and ostracize people with whom this would have been completely unthinkable just a few years ago. Where you said that this is all perfectly normal and constitutional.

If you want to investigate an organizational structure, for example, you naturally also look at whom the target is associating with, and then we also investigate these people. We examine the social circle, the employer, the lover, the buddies who come to a barbecue, in other words everything we can find. We try to get an overall picture. We do this according to the rules of the trade, and these rules are the same for everyone, regardless of whether they are left-wing extremists or state delegitimizers. We do everything we can and do everything we do with real extremists.”

According to this whistleblower, this could already affect people who only dislike a certain party, have hung up a poster or held up a sign at a demonstration. These are all statements from a former employee of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

As you can imagine, the man has since been suspended from his job and is being prosecuted by his former employer with all legal means at his disposal.

Aya Velázquez herself set her lawyer on the Verfassungsschutz and got her file deleted, but no doubt she is still a person of interest – now more than ever.

She explains a bit more on the website of Wir beobachten zurück (my translation):

The declared aim of today’s massively expanded preventive thought snooping is to identify alleged “unconstitutional efforts” before they can gain influence. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution defines an “unconstitutional effort” as a targeted attempt to eliminate the free democratic basic order.

Mark Weber once put it much more eloquent than I am able to replicate, but the core of his statement was that “democratic” does not mean the same thing to our governments that it does to the general public. To the government, “democracy” means the institutions put in place, which includes established parties and their delegates. Thus, everything that falls outside of “the system”, the “status quo”, is undemocratic or “a threat to our democracy” by that definition.

In order to detect such attempts at an early stage and bring about the social ostracism of those involved – so-called “decomposition” [Zersetzung, that bad word from those evil twelve years of German history] – the Office for the Protection of the Constitution is already targeting thought crimes that it assumes could one day develop into “unconstitutional efforts”. It should be obvious that vague terms such as “delegitimization of the state” open the door to political abuse of power – especially as the Office for the Protection of the Constitution is under the control of the Ministry of the Interior and therefore always reports to the current government.

By that logic, criticism of individual politicians, of parties or their politics, qualify as delegitimization of the state. Again, as Mark Weber pointed out: Our politicians confuse democracy with their own persons.

The goal of Wir beobachten zurück is to find out how widespread this observation by the Verfassungsschutz really is. Aya Velázquez asks her viewers and readers to use her inquiry form generator to request information from all relevant intelligence agencies – the Federal Office as well as its branches in the individual German states, military intelligence etc. – if they are keeping files on their person and if so, for what reason. The results are to be published in a planned monthly report.

I must admit, I’m tempted to go ahead and request information about my potential file. As a writer for Counter-Currents, I definitely qualify as a “delegitimizer”, if not worse. And said potential file has been a running joke among my family and friends for many years, every time I try to get obscure items through customs: A biography of Heinrich Himmler, for example – as a blue-eyed blonde, I got that stare from the customs official, prompting a friend of mine, likewise blond and blue-eyed, to joke how unfortunate it was that he hadn’t come along for the fun. “We’re looking for inspiration for our family planning!” (I was allowed to keep the biography, by the way.) Or that Valor Studios art print featuring a historically correct but forbidden swastika. (I was allowed to keep that as well, because Valor Studios had stuffed so many additional items into the parcel that the customs official simply gave up and waved me through without checking.) Or the DVD of the British Jud Süß version. (Luckily, that one simply arrived in my mailbox without me having to discuss film history with a customs official.)

But as curious as I am about what the Verfassungsschutz might have on me, the thing is – if I am not on its radar now, I will be as soon as I send in the request! This is what more conspiratorially minded people have also pointed out, and some of them have even accused Wir beobachten zurück of being an operation by the Verfassungsschutz. Anything is possible, of course, but for now, I’m giving Aya Velázquez the benefit of the doubt.