German website under investigation for treason

Markus Beckedahl is one of the editors under investigation for treason

                                                       By Jules Johnson

This is the first case of such allegations against a German journalist since the 1962 Spiegel affair.

Germany’s Attorney General has announced he will no longer be taking part in a treason investigation of Germany’s Netzpolitik.org, a political and tech news website currently under investigation for the publication of secret government documents earlier this year.
Speaking to German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Attorney General Harald Range said that “with regard to the freedom of press and speech,” he will “refrain from using the executive measures that the criminal procedure code provides” against the journalists, who revealed information detailing Germany’s plans to expand domestic Internet surveillance.

While there have still been no official charges, editors Markus Beckedahl and Andre Meister received a letter from the German Federal Public Prosecutor, spurring an uproar in social media sources, as #Landesverrat (#treason) immediately trended on German Twitter.
In a statement on their website, Beckedahl and Meister said they believed “the charges against our alleged source(s) were politically motivated and targeted to crush the necessary public debate about Internet surveillance Post-Snowden.”
The clash comes two years after former U.S. security contractor Edward Snowden shook the world when he leaked classified intelligence that showed the U.S. running global surveillance programs with the help of telecom firms.
The articles in question, from February and April 2015, exposed information on Germany’s surveillance of the Internet, detailing “secret plans“ to monitor and collect a variety of Internet data, full texts of leaked surveillance budgets, and plans to create a new Internet surveillance department dedicated to improving and extending the government’s mass surveillance capabilities, which would be called the “Erweiterte Fachunterstützung Internet” or “Extended Specialist Support Internet” department.
“We don’t know if we should cry or not,” Beckedahl, the site’s editor-in-chief, told tech website Ars. “We leaked some internal documents of the secret service of Germany in the spring, documenting that they are building up a mass surveillance on social networks with lots of new jobs and new capabilities,” Beckedahl added.
The German Journalists Association called the development an attack on press freedom, with chairman Michael Konken describing it as an “impermissible attempt to make two critical colleagues silenced,” the AFP reported.
The last time such charges were brought against a journalist in Germany was the so called “Spiegel Affair” in 1962, when the editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel was accused of treason by then defense minister Franz Josef Strauss for publishing secret documents about the German defense forces. This case was rejected by the German Federal Court.