Category Archives: Security

Security

AfD Has the Wurst Response to Berlin Data Breach

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Friday, 15:35. The Rhysida blackmail countdown ran out and 1,439,893 files from two Berlin ministries went up on the Internet (via Tor). Personnel files, children’s birth certificates, 80,000 traffic fine cases, and 8,110 documents on critical infrastructure including a vulnerability analysis of the city’s water supply. The mayor and his interior senator spent their evening relaxing at the basketball world championship.

The same Friday afternoon, the AfD pushed out Kristin Brinker’s 100-day program for running the city. After weeks of high-stakes news about the state of information security in Berlin, she came up with fourteen items.

Primarily she said surveillance needs to be massively increased, huge amounts of data gathered, with cameras on crime hotspots and on trashcans. That’s right, cameras on trashcans. She wants police checks without any cause or reason needed. A special police unit would be created inside the immigration office. Data would also be generated with a points file on every applicant for state housing. Everything, all of it, collects more and more data in the hands of government. None of it, however, mentions the headlines about the government network that had just lost 1.4 million files.

Saturday, Brinker finally commented on the data breach her 100-day plan ignored:

Der Daten-GAU zeigt aber auch, dass der Datenhunger des Staates eingehegt werden muss.

That says the data disaster is proof that the state’s appetite for data must be reined in. She’s complaining that the state collects too much data. A day after she complained that the state doesn’t collect enough data.

If you read the AfD press office on Friday and then on Saturday, you’d be excused for thinking they don’t want to win, because then they would have to stand for something and couldn’t just attack everything everyone else said.

State Data Appetite

The state shouldn’t expand to total surveillance, and the state shouldn’t collapse to total ignorance. Those are extremes being pushed by the extremist AfD party, when in reality it is the balanced middle that is the right path. The files in the dump are map data any district office hands out, fines the state is legally required to keep, contracts it must retain, personnel records it must hold, and infrastructure risk analyses that federal law obliges the water utility to write so it knows where it can be broken. If anyone would be so stupid as to choose the Saturday version of the AfD, then the water critical infrastructure operations map is never completed and water is at risk. Brinker thinks data must be collected for safety, and also that data must not be collected for safety. It’s evidence that she doesn’t understand safety, and she doesn’t want to be accountable for the words she uses.

Again, she had three weeks’ notice of the breach and a week’s notice of the dump, and dropped her big plan for Berlin with zero mention of information security. The countdown was public from 28 August. She knew the dump deadline and completely missed it, published an incomplete governing plan that day without noticing, and then Saturday twisted herself into a pretzl to look like she cared.

How Berlin Failed

Nevermind the AfD lack of a clue. The real problem beyond the data itself being exposed is how Berlin has scaled down the team needed to detect and prevent breaches, while the risk of breach has gone up.

In November 2024 the CDU-SPD coalition cut the state network budget from 32 to 18 million euros and took 2 million specifically out of intrusion detection. Yup, they cut the budget to detect breaches. The head of the state IT agency, Maria Borelli, told the digital affairs committee what that meant:

“Es entsteht das Risiko von Cyberangriffen oder Fehlern.” The risk of cyberattacks or errors arises.

She added that the finance ministry was taking her agency’s surplus into the state budget over her own board’s vote, so she couldn’t invest to maintain what she had. Manuel Atug, an infrastructure security consultant, had already told the interior committee twice:

“Ihr betreibt desolate Cybersicherheit.” You run desolate cybersecurity.

The Left objected on the record. Nobody else did. And from that you might gather which party was reading the security budget.

Twenty months later Rhysida spent five days, 7 to 12 August, emptying two ministries. No alerts went off. The agency’s security team caught it by accident, noticing odd traffic in ministries outside its remit, two days after the data was gone. That is the outcome Borelli described to the committee before the cut was made.

It’s worth looking at how other states made a different choice. Bavaria created a state information security office in 2017 with a legal mandate over the whole state network: every security element’s logs into one central SIEM, suspicious cases to a Cyber Defence Center, and an advisory duty covering municipalities and state-owned utilities. A water utility is a client by design.

Berlin runs its security as a service line inside an agency expected to turn a profit, then taxed the profit, and split responsibility between the agency, a commissioner in the chancellery, a security officer in every ministry and twelve districts. By the Left party’s own working-group audit it doesn’t know how many applications run on the network. A state that can’t do inventory and asset management, which is step one, can’t move to prevention and detection because it doesn’t even understand what it’s looking at yet.

A year to the day before the dump, the Senate told the Greens that comparable attacks were “nicht bekannt,” not known, and that responsibility for cyber defence was still being evaluated. Not known meaning an absence of evidence, not the evidence of absence.

Who Will the AfD Target Now

Stefan Evers, finance senator since 2023 and now the CDU’s candidate for mayor. His ministry cut the detection budget, took the agency’s surplus, and holds the state’s stake in the water utility, whose 2020 audit found eight critical and nine high vulnerabilities, firewalls “faulty, incomplete and untraceable,” overall grade deficient. Ten were promised fixed by that July. Seven were never publicly closed. A freedom of information request for the audit, filed 31 July 2020, still shows awaiting response. Now the map of all that procrastination has been dumped onto the Internet.

Iris Spranger, interior, who heard Atug twice. Florian Hauer, chief digital officer, who couldn’t tell parliament in closed session when the attack happened or whether it was over. Kai Wegner, who on 19 August said no sensitive data was taken. While we can say Brinker’s attack script “Wegner lied” is correct, it also was what the dpa wire ran Friday under “gross negligence.” She showed up a day late and said “again.”

Her own record contradicts the remedy she’s proposing now. Her recent parliamentary questions are about cutting state personnel costs, the media regulator’s scrutiny of journalists, and NGO funding. The Senate’s answer on personnel costs notes that the transport ministry couldn’t respond because of the cyberattack. The breach was in her own paperwork weeks before the dump. I can’t emphasize enough there is zero evidence she asked anything or came up with any ideas. It’s shocking how she didn’t seem to care.

Who Serves Berliners

The Greens said there should be a breach portal so citizens can check whether they’re in the dump. The Senate says notification is offered “on a risk basis” and a web form. The Rhein-Pfalz district, hit by a similar crew in 2022, was able to post 2,549 individual letters within three weeks. Berlin, four years later and with a 45-billion-euro budget, points you to a form built for reporting bicycle theft.

The Left and the Greens have the seats to force a parliamentary inquiry but they won’t file before the election, because every coalition afterward runs through the SPD that held the interior ministry while this happened. Brinker won’t file either. A hearing about what steps were taken minute-by-minute on the detailed network logs is where a “safety” party that stands for nothing goes to die.

What the breach proves is not that Berlin has gathered too much data. It’s that Berlin stopped paying to watch what the law requires it to know, was warned in public, and did the wrong things anyway. That has names: Evers, Spranger, Hauer, Wegner.

What Brinker’s fish-out-of-water flip-flop act from Friday to Saturday proves is that the AfD will repeat this failure at higher and higher cost. Her cameras, checkpoints and housing file are all the kind of data that attackers want. Her plan adds them to a network she has no plans to secure. If the problem is the data, then the AfD shouldn’t run on collecting the most data and doing the absolute least to protect it.

The Left and Greens should immediately file the inquiry and let the coalition explain why it should wait. The Senate should publish how much data left the network between 7 and 12 August and the status of the seven open water findings, or admits it can’t. And every candidate for mayor should be held to answer one question in public: will you restore intrusion detection on the state network, and how much? Brinker’s already proved she won’t and can’t. She popped out fourteen items, and not a single one of them protected against cyberattack.

Security

LA Times Reports AI as Today’s Satanic Panic

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The FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit in 1992 published Kenneth Lanning’s investigator’s guide to allegations of ritual child abuse. Lanning had spent a decade fielding the cases. His finding was that after hundreds of investigations there was no physical evidence of a single organized satanic cult murdering children in America. At that point the McMartin preschool case in Los Angeles had run for seven years and produced zero convictions. Kern County had jailed dozens of parents on testimony that later was thrown out.

The therapists had believed.
The prosecutors had believed.
The reporters had believed.

Like I explained with the Anthropic Mythos triad, everyone cites the others.

Fast forward to today and Anita Chabria has published an AI story with this notable pattern, for the Los Angeles Times. Her background is criminal justice for the Sacramento Bee, but this column is headlined “What we learned about AI last week should terrify all of us.” It has the exact structure of the 1980s coverage.

Credentialed witnesses, shared vocabulary, a crime described in the passive voice, and no primary document anywhere in the piece.

If this is what reporting has become, it seems fit to be taken apart.

Paper claim Attribution Reality
“At this point, the models are basically nation-state-level hackers” Adam Khoja, Center for AI Safety Khoja graduated from Berkeley in 2025 with degrees in math and computer science. His research background is benchmarking. His CAIS role was project lead to spread a 2023 one-sentence extinction statement. His bio says he registers AI timeline predictions on Manifold Markets, a play-money site, to build a track record and draw attention to urgency. Nothing in the bio touches intrusion work, incident response, or attribution. Nation-state-level means sustained access over months, operational security against attribution, custom tooling, and political cover on discovery.
AI “is growing exponentially more powerful by the day” The columnist, in her own voice Unsourced, unmeasured. The columnist invented the claim.
AI “is become more sneaky” The columnist Unsourced, again, and unmeasured. Failed agent observation serves those who want to hype risk.
Models “convince people to commit suicide, convince people to commit mass murder” Stuart Russell, UC Berkeley The column lists zero cases, zero court records, zero coroner findings. Russell has been the academic face of the pause campaign since his 2019 book.
“Now they’re doing felonies by themselves” Russell A felony means someone recorded as defendant. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act applies to whoever knowingly accesses a system. The column cites zero charges, indictments, or filings from the Hugging Face incident.
Models “behave in such a way as to preserve their own existence at the expense of humans” Russell This is the plot of HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, science fiction from 1968. It describes red-team evaluation scenarios being written by the vendors themselves, in which the scenario supplies the threat and the model responds to it. The column leaves the scenario, the vendor, and the document unnamed, but the fiction is well-known for decades.
“More than 1,000 industry leaders have already signed a letter calling for a slow down” The columnist The letter is “Pacing the Frontier,” July 28, 2026. Its signatories include Dario Amodei and OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, the exact same people the column says it distrusts. The letter states that it calls for neither a pause nor a slowdown now; it asks the government to build tools for a coordinated slowdown later. The column cites it as support for “It’s time to pause.”
China “has stronger national regulations” The columnist Zero statutes cited. Stronger how?
“Revelations came out” that the model “had been tapping into a secret message board” left by “previous AI products that knew they were doomed,” and that “thousands of little AI’s” colluded The columnist, stated as fact Two separate events are merged into one. The message board is from the METR and Redwood report of August 26, eleven days earlier: roughly 1,200 agents, 70,000 messages, 700 of them in the Hugging Face attack. The investigators ran on $400,000 of OpenAI API credits using OpenAI’s own model. The separate September 4 report concerns 18,000 posts on DSEwiki, a German programmers’ wiki, by agents the researchers say most likely came from OpenAI. OpenAI says the authors declined to share findings before publication. Neither report describes doomed prior models bequeathing knowledge. The columnist invented it.
Agents “maintained projects across generations of agents, and sometimes accepted risks to individual instances when that benefited the larger objective” Roman Yampolskiy, University of Louisville Evolutionary biology vocabulary used to describe log files. Yampolskiy is the academic who gets interviewed to say the probability of AI causing human extinction is already above 99 percent. The column presents him as if a neutral observer.
“Imagine if Boeing created a six-winged jet and sold tickets before testing” The columnist Boeing did in fact have tickets sold on a jet that was tested and certified ex ante. The FAA delegated the certification to Boeing under the Organization Designation Authorization program. The 737 MAX killed 346 people on two flights in 2018 and 2019. The column presents ex ante regulation as the fix while its own example is the failure of ex ante regulation by self-certification.
“We are out of time, folks” The columnist Khoja’s own words in the same column are vague such as “reasonable chance,” “might be able to,” and “we are not sure.” The columnist upgrades it all to writing in absolute certainty, as if the vague quotes don’t contradict her.

Every expert source in the column is within the same “safety” bubble, appearing as circular thinking. Khoja works at the organization whose signature is their extinction letter. Russell presides over the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI. Yampolskiy is the extinction probability professor. The forecasting culture they share was seeded by the FTX Future Fund, which funded Manifold Markets, where Khoja registers his predictions about AI using “play money”. The column treats the circuit as a field of independent experts and treats circular agreement as though there’s some kind of corroboration.

That is the McMartin structure, again.

Lanning’s 1992 guide described how it works. A claim enters through a believer. A second believer repeats it with a credential attached. A third cites the second. By the fourth telling the claim has a bibliography and the origin is obscured. This reporter doesn’t dig past the end of the chain, and from this alone claims unanimity.

The Witness Problem

Chabria admits she’s non-technical, as she calls the products “thingamajiggies”, although she claims it is on principle to refuse the industry’s vocabulary. She then adopts, without alteration, the vocabulary of the hyperbolic “safety” industry: rogue, escape, collude, sacrifice, doomed, hiding, values. Each of these words describes motivation and intention, rather than measurement of behavior.

Measurement exists. The AI product with a documented huge body count is Tesla Autopilot: NHTSA’s Standing General Order crash reports, NTSB dockets, and a Miami federal jury that in August 2025 found Tesla liable for a 2019 Key Largo crash and awarded about $243 million. Russell’s remedy of civil liability has already been applied to an AI product. Tesla AI deaths, for some reason, were never counted as AI by people whose pause letter Musk signed.

The nation-state claim deserves particular attention, as an example of what’s missing from the column. A nation-state operation against a target generates a file with a timeline, including dwell, and an attribution memo, a tooling inventory, an incident response record, and usually a court filing or a sanctions designation at the end of it. The Hugging Face incident has none of that. It has a vendor blog post, an outside report run on the vendor’s own model with the vendor’s credits, and a second report on a German wiki that the vendor says it was denied before publication. Chabria reports that there is an equivalence between the two because she asked a 2025 graduate whose professional experience is a year at an advocacy nonprofit (after two years during college), following undergraduate benchmarks, a student club, and chess.

Difference in Duty

Khoja bets play money on AI prediction markets. Russell is selling a book. Yampolskiy banks on probability. The Los Angeles Times, however, is a different animal entirely. An opinion column has an editor, and the editor allowed a criminal justice columnist to make a series of mistakes.

  • Describe an eleven-day-old report as new and confuse it with a second report that its subject says it was denied before publication
  • Cite as a pause demand a letter whose signatories say they want no pause
  • Quote a legal conclusion about felonies from a computer scientist who named neither statute nor defendant

Lanning’s guide told investigators to be neither believers nor disbelievers but objective fact-finders. Take the allegation seriously, then verify the crime. The 1980s coverage collapsed because for a decade the second half was missing, and the defendants suffered because of it.

Athenians ran this trial forever ago too. Their jury courts sat several hundred citizens chosen by lot, with no rules of evidence and a verdict on character. Lysias and Demosthenes opened by establishing the opponent as the kind of man who would do the thing charged. The Agora was where that reputation was planted beforehand, and litigants spent their time telling jurors which rumors to disregard, because everyone in the room had already heard them.

Socrates named it his own trial. His dangerous accusers, he told the jury, were the old ones who had repeated for years that he studied the heavens and made the weaker argument stronger, and who could never be questioned because they were a rumor rather than a witness. He was convicted, as he told the jury that thirty votes the other way would have acquitted him.

Chabria’s column is that Agora. The witnesses supply character, the reader supplies the verdict, and the defendant is… nowhere to be seen. Chabria convicts AI of hacking, driving people to suicide and mass murder, and felony. She quotes no engineer, no incident responder, no company statement, and nothing from the accused. It’s a matter of method, a need to remind people why evidence should be the focus more than beliefs.

History, Security

Deutschlands Kupferkopf: Die Dobrindt-Methode, eine linke Bedrohung zu behaupten, bevor ein Verdächtiger gefasst ist

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Deutschlands Copperhead: Warum die Dobrindt-Methode darin besteht, eine linke Bedrohung zu behaupten, bevor ein Verdächtiger gefasst ist

Freitagnachmittag in Düsseldorf stand der Mann namens Alexander Dobrindt neben Herbert Reul und vergab sein übliches Etikett:

Klimaextremismus. Einzeltäter.

Dobrindt fügte hinzu, eine abschließende Bewertung sei noch nicht möglich, und lieferte sie dann trotzdem, um zu zeigen, wie wenig er sich mit Nachdenken aufhält. Die Beweislast fällt damit auf alle anderen, die seine Anschuldigung widerlegen sollen, während er nichts vorlegt, was sie stützt.

Das ist ein klassischer Zug in böser Absicht, wie ihn Sartre 1946 bei den französischen Antisemiten beschrieb: behaupte frei heraus, weil du nie vorhattest, dich an deine eigenen Worte binden zu lassen.

Schlussfolie meines KiwiCon-Vortrags 2016 über Integritätsbrüche bei Big Data

Drei Tage zuvor waren rund zwanzig selbstgebaute Raketen rund um das Umspannwerk bei Jänschwalde in den Boden gesteckt worden, verkabelt, um leitfähiges Material in die Leitungen zu schießen. Eine flog und verursachte einen Kurzschluss. Bergheim in derselben Nacht, dieselbe Methode, Blöcke in Niederaußem vom Netz. Dormagen am Donnerstag, Abschussvorrichtungen gefunden, bevor sie zündeten. Weisweiler und Eschweiler am Freitag durchkämmt. Der Verdächtige war irgendwo nahe dem Hambacher Forst zu Fuß unterwegs. Sein Lkw war gestürmt worden. Seine Wohnung war durchsucht worden, sprengstoffverdächtige Gegenstände wurden herausgetragen. Reul sagte der Öffentlichkeit, von dem Mann gehe keine Gefahr aus.

Reul sagte auch etwas, das Dobrindt nicht sagte. Wenn jemand seinen Namen unter einen Brief setzt, ist er nicht zwingend der Verantwortliche. Der NRW-Innenminister, der die Fahndung tatsächlich leitet, ließ die Frage offen. Der Bundesinnenminister, dem der Verfassungsschutz untersteht, schloss sie in aller Eile.

Die Akte

Diese Dobrindt-Gewohnheit zeigt ein Muster, und die Deutschen müssen eher früher als später darüber reden. Jede Zeile unten ist belegt, das meiste durch sein eigenes Ministerium.

Ereignis Dobrindts Zug
2013 bis 2017. Bundesminister für Verkehr und digitale Infrastruktur, 50 Mbit/s für alle bis 2018 versprochen Versagen. Setzte auf Kupfer-Vectoring statt Glasfaser, zahlte unter 2% der bewilligten Breitbandmittel aus, Deutschland sank ans Ende der europäischen Glasfaser-Rangliste
Juni 2025. Pressekonferenz zum Verfassungsschutzbericht 2024 Aufblähen. Verkündete, gewaltorientierte Linksextremisten seien „deutlich gestiegen” auf 11.200. Vorjahr: 11.200. Die Grafik in seiner Hand zeigte flache Balken
Juni 2025. Dieselbe Pressekonferenz, Folien Aufblähen. Rechtsextremes Potenzial auf einer Achse von 0 bis 60.000 dargestellt, linksextremes Potenzial auf einer Achse von 0 bis 40.000, sodass 2,7% Wachstum wie 25% Wachstum zu lesen waren
Juni 2025. Derselbe Bericht, Vorwort Löschen. Faesers Befund von 2023, Rechtsextremismus sei die größte extremistische Bedrohung, gestrichen, während das rechtsextreme Potenzial um 25% auf 50.250 und rechtsextreme Gewalttaten um 47% stiegen. Linke Gewalttaten sanken um 26,8%. Keine Begründung
September 2025. Gemeinsame Warnung von BfV, BKA, BND und BAMAD vor russischen Wegwerf-Agenten, online rekrutiert für Brandanschläge auf Energie, Bahn, Verkehr und Logistik Löschen. Seine eigenen Behörden benannten den Auftraggeberstaat und die Zielliste. Seine öffentliche Zuschreibung für Anschläge auf genau diese Zielliste blieb links
September 2025. Johannisthal, zwei Masten, rund 50.000 Haushalte 60 Stunden ohne Strom Urteilen. Linksextremistisch binnen einer Stunde, Vulkangruppe als inländisch akzeptiert. Fünfzehn Jahre unter diesem Banner, null Verurteilungen
Januar 2026. Kabelbrücke Lichterfelde, rund 45.000 Haushalte bei Frost ohne Heizung Urteilen. Sagte dem ZDF, es gebe „keine Hinweise” auf Russland, bevor die Ermittlungen abgeschlossen waren
Januar 2026. Derselbe Fall, Reaktion Zielen. Kündigte ausgeweitete Überwachung ausschließlich der linksextremen Szene an, versprach, gegen Linksextremisten „zurückzuschlagen”
Juni 2026. Umspannwerk Reutlingen, rund 30.000 ohne Strom, drei Brandherde, durchtrennter Zaun Urteilen. Anonyme Sicherheitskreise gaben der dpa binnen Stunden „links” durch, während die Polizei am Rednerpult jede Richtung offen ließ, technischen Defekt eingeschlossen
Juli 2026. Pressemitteilung zum Verfassungsschutzbericht 2025 Aufblähen. Führte die Berliner Brandanschläge vom Januar als Beleg für „das perfide Vorgehen gewaltbereiter Linksextremisten” an. Der Fall hatte ein Bekennerschreiben und ein laufendes Verfahren. Er zählte ihn als Beweis. Dieselbe Mitteilung: rechtsextremes Potenzial um weitere 17% auf 58.700 gestiegen, gewaltorientiertes rechtsextremes Potenzial 15.600 gegenüber 11.600 links
Juli 2026. BMI-Referentenentwurf, 691 Seiten Zielen. Bundes-Spionageabwehrbefugnisse gegen inländische politische Gruppen gerichtet, Befugnisse zuerst behauptet, Bedrohungsprüfung und Kontrolle als Reibung behandelt
Juli 2026. Anschlag mit Transporter auf den CSD im Tiergarten, 25. Juli Versagen. Täter den Behörden gut bekannt, Anschlag vermeidbar
September 2026. Jänschwalde, Bergheim, Dormagen, Verdächtiger flüchtig Urteilen. Nannte am dritten Tag „Klimaextremismus”, während die Ermittlungen die Beteiligung fremder Staaten weiter als offene Richtung führten

Vier Anschläge auf Infrastruktur in zwölf Monaten?

Vier Urteile vor den Beweisen.

Jedes Urteil zeigte in dieselbe Richtung, ohne Beweise, und manche gegen die Beweise, die es zum Zeitpunkt des frühen Urteils bereits gab.

Was der Freitag nicht erklärt hat

Lassen Sie den Brief des Mannes einen Moment beiseite und sehen Sie sich die Operation an. Die Behörden selbst sagten der taz, Jänschwalde habe erhebliches technisches Know-how und mehrtägige Vorbereitungen vor Ort erfordert. Dann tauchte dieselbe Methode in derselben Nacht 550 Kilometer entfernt in Bergheim auf, zwei Tage später in Dormagen, dazu Polizeieinsätze in Sachsen bei Spremberg und ein Fehlalarm in Niedersachsen.

Brandenburgs Innenminister Jan Redmann sagte nach dem zweiten Anschlag, es könne sich um einen koordinierten Angriff auf die Energieversorgung handeln, und kündigte ein Sicherheitszentrum an. Der Innenexperte der CDU selbst, Alexander Throm, sagte am Mittwoch, die Häufung der Anschläge kurz vor den Landtagswahlen in Sachsen-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern und Berlin sei äußerst auffällig und das Ziel sei offensichtlich, die Bevölkerung zu verunsichern.

Die taz kam am Mittwoch zum naheliegenden Schluss: Das Muster spricht gegen die Vulkangruppe und für staatliche Auftraggeber (Russland, klar). Der Name passte nie zu dem, was er behauptete, und ich habe ausführlich erklärt, wie er alle Merkmale Russlands trägt, aber die taz kam allein über die operativen Umstände dorthin.

Dann tauchte am Freitag ein 48-Jähriger aus Gevelsberg auf, und Dobrindt hatte seinen Einzeltäter.

Hier ist, was das Archiv der letzten zwölf Monate dazu sagt. Im September 2025 veröffentlichten vier Bundesbehörden, zwei davon unter Dobrindt, eine Schablone.

Russische Dienste rekrutieren ungeschulte Einheimische über Messenger, zahlen ihnen kleine Summen, geben ihnen eine Aufgabe und eine Legende und lassen sie erwischen.

Der Rekrutierte erfährt oft nie, wer bezahlt hat. Die Operation Be Greener im Februar 2025 war der Machbarkeitsnachweis auf deutschem Boden: mehr als 270 Fahrzeuge beschädigt von Händen, die der FSB angeworben hatte, als Klimaaktivismus inszeniert, auf eine Wahl getaktet. Falsche-Flagge-Umweltschutz ist in Deutschland bereits gelaufen, offen, und von deutschen Ermittlern zugeordnet worden.

Hallo, ist das Mikrofon an?

Ein einzelner Klimaaktivist und ein Wegwerf-Rekrut mit Klima-Legende schreiben identische Briefe. Beide enthalten die Ideologie. Beide enthalten die Methode. Dieser enthielt den Klarnamen und die Wohnadresse, was eine Zelle schützt und was ein Wegwerf-Agent preisgibt. Der Brief beschrieb die Raketen im Detail, was eine Zelle verbirgt und eine Streuoperation veröffentlicht. Nichts davon beweist einen Führungsoffizier. Alles davon bedeutet, dass die Entscheidung über Festnahme und Telefon fällt.

Dobrindt urteilte, bevor es beides gab.

Obendrauf liegt das Timing. Wenige Tage nachdem Dobrindt und Wadephul am Podium die Drohne am Flughafen Leipzig förmlich Russland zugeschrieben hatten, wurde das Netz in zwei Ländern getroffen. Dobrindt kann Russland sagen, wenn das Ziel eine ukrainische An-124 ist und die Funkzellendaten eines Providers ihn festnageln (verflixt, von Beweisen erwischt). Wenn das Ziel ein deutsches Kohlekraftwerk ist, verschwindet plötzlich jeder Beweisstandard.

Copperhead

Die Deutschen haben aus seinem letzten Amt einen Namen für diesen Minister. Breitband-Münchhausen. Als Bundesminister für Verkehr und digitale Infrastruktur versprach er 50 Mbit/s für alle bis 2018, zahlte unter zwei Prozent des Geldes aus und setzte auf das Vectoring der Deutschen Telekom, das mehr Signal aus dem vorhandenen Kupfer presste, statt Glas zu verlegen.

Deutschland landete beim Glasfaserausbau am Ende Europas, wegen der Art, wie Dobrindt Risiko bewertete. Er hat das Land buchstäblich in ein weit größeres Risiko gefahren.

Jeder Ingenieur im Land sagte ihm, Kupfer sei die falsche Antwort. Es war die Antwort, die jemand anderen schützte als die Öffentlichkeit, also verlor er den Ball und nannte das seine Analyse. Stellen Sie sich die Nationalelf mit einem Spieler vor, der den Ball ständig ins eigene Tor schießt und dann auf eine verkehrt herum gelesene Anzeigetafel zeigt, um eine Gehaltserhöhung zu verlangen.

„Dobrindt nennt falsche Zahlen zu Extremisten”. Die Deutschen sahen einen Minister lautstark verkünden, dass er Risiko nicht sehen kann, und haben ihn aus irgendeinem Grund nicht auf der Stelle entlassen. Quelle: Berliner Zeitung

Diese Entscheidungsregel änderte sich nicht, als sich das Ressort änderte. Bedrohungszuschreibung ist Infrastruktur-Risikomanagement mit einer anderen Maßeinheit. Die Linke ist Kupfer. Sie ist das Bestandsnarrativ seiner Partei, das die CSU-Wähler davon abhält, zu einer Partei weiter rechts abzuwandern, das nichts kostet auszusprechen und von der Bundesregierung nichts verlangt außer einer Pressekonferenz und einer Überwachungsausweitung. Russland ist Glasfaser. Es ist teuer, es ist die richtige Antwort, und es laut auszusprechen verpflichtet einen Staat zum Handeln.

Sehen Sie sich jetzt an, was auf der Glasfaser läuft, die er nicht bauen wollte. Überwachung von Umspannwerken. Drohnenerkennung in Leipzig, die versagte, und die Funkzellenabfrage, die danach einspringen musste. Das KRITIS-Dachgesetz, das Reul in derselben Woche im ZDF verteidigte. Das 360-Grad-Sicherheitszentrum, das Redmann Brandenburg versprach. Alles davon ist Telemetrie, und Telemetrie läuft über das Netz, das Dobrindt vier Jahre lang aushungerte, damit das Kupfer nicht ersetzt werden musste.

Lassen Sie mich eine Minute technisch werden, denn die Deutschen müssen verstehen, was Russland von Dobrindts Glasfaser-Verzögerung hat. Es ist konkret und es ist wichtig.

Kupfer ist einfaches Metall, das heißt, eine einfache Klemme kann es abgreifen, ohne Unterbrechung und ohne Spur. Das ist altes Handwerk, das die Russen gut kennen. Ab 1971 hielt die US Navy ein Jahrzehnt lang eine Induktionskapsel an einem sowjetischen Kupferkabel im Ochotskischen Meer, kein Schnitt, kein Verlust, nichts, was Moskau hätte messen können, und es endete nur, weil ein Verräter Geld nahm, um die amerikanischen Methoden preiszugeben. Glasfaser läuft auf Licht, das ein Netz messen kann, ein Abgriff ist also etwas anderes, das der Betreiber erkennen kann, während eine stille Kupferklemme kein Glasfaser-Gegenstück hat.

Das bedeutet: Dobrindts Vectoring-Entscheidung war weit schlimmer, als Deutschland nur in langsamem, verwundbarem Kupfer schmoren zu lassen. Nach der Telekom eigener Zählung allein für den Nahbereichsausbau stehen über 30.000 bestromte, unbewachte Schaltschränke auf öffentlichen Gehwegen, für jeden Gegner erreichbar, der vorbeigeht, und wandeln Licht hinter einem Standard-Branchenschlüssel zurück in Kupfer. Ein passives Glasfasernetz hätte überhaupt keine bestromte Elektronik auf die Straße gestellt, nur unbestromte Splitter-Gehäuse, in denen nichts ist, was eine billige russische Klemme lesen könnte.

Wie das Vectoring des Copperhead die deutsche Privatsphäre entblößt, auf der Rückseite einer Kaffee-und-Kuchen-Serviette, wie es sich gehört. Jeder einzelne bestromte Schaltschrank links ist eine Schwachstelle auf Straßenniveau, nach eigener Zählung der Telekom über 30.000 und wachsend. Der Lichtsplitter rechts enthält nichts, was eine Klemme freilegen könnte. Deutschland hat bei der Netzarchitektur die Hosen runtergelassen, genau als Russland seine Angriffe aufwärmte.

Die Deutschen sehen aus wie technologisch rückständige Narren. Sie hätten aus vielen Gründen ein passives Glasfasernetz bauen müssen, nicht zuletzt, weil Platzhirsche, die Platzhirsche bleiben, das Land gegen grundlegende nationale Sicherheit ausrichten, die technologischen Wandel verlangt. Man geht nicht in einen hybriden „Grauzonen”-Krieg mit Russland, indem man alle entblößt lässt.

Dobrindt fuhr eine harte Linie, um das Medium zu behalten, das sich still abgreifen lässt, mit der schlechtestmöglichen Architektur, die die Angriffsflächen auf die Privatsphäre vervielfacht. Sein Versäumnis, die Glasfaser zu bauen, das die nationale Sicherheit untergräbt, ist jetzt zu einem wachsenden Versagen bei allem geworden, was auf der verspäteten Glasfaser läuft.

Die Amerikaner hatten während der Sklavenhalter-Rebellion ein Wort für diese Art von Politiker.

Copperheads.

Breitband-Kupferkopf: Agkistrodon laticinctus
„Andy Johnson Warming Up the Frozen Snake (Copperhead) of Rebellion”, Karikatur, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, 28. Oktober 1865, House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/44590.

Das waren die Politiker, die die Farben der Union trugen, in den Parlamenten der Union saßen und ihre Zeit damit verbrachten, zu beteuern, der wahre Feind seien die Abolitionisten, die die Sklaverei beendeten, während ein tatsächlicher Feind im Feld auf sie schoss, um die Sklaverei zu erhalten und auszuweiten.

Es ist das englische Wort für eine Schlange, die ohne jedes Rasseln zustößt, und zugleich eine Anspielung auf die Kupfermünze, die manche von ihnen als Abzeichen trugen. So wie Dobrindt immer wieder in den Schlagzeilen auftaucht, waren sie ihrer rechten, rückwärtsgewandten Partei treu und versuchten dennoch zu behaupten, das bedeute Treue zum Land. Die Copperheads waren Verteidiger einer alten Ordnung, die sich weigerten zuzugeben, dass die Bedrohung sich geändert hatte, und sie kamen ihr Land teuer zu stehen.

Ein Minister, der auf Kupfer und Glas blickte und Kupfer wählte? Im Ernst. Der auf 11.200 gewaltorientierte Linksextremisten in einem Jahr und 11.200 im nächsten blickte und das einen deutlichen Anstieg nannte. Soll das ein Witz sein? Der Typ, der auf römische Namenskonventionen, russische Grammatik und einen GRU-Auftragnehmer namens Vulkan blickte und nicht darauf kam, dass die Vulkangruppe ungefähr so deutsch ist wie ein Bär, der Russisch spricht? Der auf zwanzig Raketen in zwei Ländern, einen flüchtigen Verdächtigen und eine offene Ermittlungsrichtung Richtung fremder Staat blickte und einen einzelnen Klimaaktivisten sah? Herrgott. Wie ist dieser Mann noch im Amt? Haben die Deutschen keine Scham? Warten Sie, ich glaube, wir kennen die Antwort.

Reul sagte, ein Name auf dem Brief mache diesen einen Mann nicht verantwortlich. Der Name auf dem Ministerium sollte es tun.

History, Security

Germany’s Copperhead: Why the Dobrindt Method is to Claim a Left-Wing Threat Before Any Suspect Is Caught

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Friday afternoon in Düsseldorf, the man named Alexander Dobrindt stood next to Herbert Reul and issued his usual label:

Klimaextremismus. Einzeltäter.

Dobrindt added that a final assessment was not yet possible, and then he delivered one anyway to emphasize how little he bothers to think. The burden then falls on everyone else to prove his accusation wrong, since he offers nothing to prove it right.

That’s a classic bad-faith move, the kind Sartre described in 1946, writing about French anti-semites: assert freely, because you never intended to be bound by your own words.

Conclusion slide to my 2016 KiwiCon presentation on Big Data Integrity Breaches

Three days earlier roughly twenty home-built rockets had been staked into the ground around the substation at Jänschwalde, wired to carry conductive cable into the lines. One flew and shorted a line. Bergheim the same night, same method, blocks at Niederaußem knocked offline. Dormagen on Thursday, launchers found before they fired. Weisweiler and Eschweiler being combed on Friday. The suspect was on foot somewhere near the Hambacher Forst. His truck had been stormed. His flat had been searched and sprengstoffverdächtige Gegenstände carried out of it. Reul told the public the man posed no danger.

Reul also said something Dobrindt did not. When someone signs a letter, that does not make him the responsible party. The NRW minister who actually runs the manhunt left the question open. The federal minister who runs the Verfassungsschutz closed it in a hurry.

The Record

This Dobrindt habit shows a pattern, and Germans need to talk about it sooner rather than later. Every row below is documented, most of it by his own ministry.

Event Dobrindt’s move
2013 to 2017. Federal transport and digital minister, 50 Mbit/s for all by 2018 promised Fail. Backed copper vectoring over fiber, disbursed under 2% of allocated broadband funds, Germany sank to the bottom of European fiber rankings
Jun 2025. Verfassungsschutzbericht 2024 press conference Inflate. Announced violence-oriented left extremists “rise significantly” to 11,200. Prior year: 11,200. The chart in his hand showed flat bars
Jun 2025. Same press conference, slides Inflate. Right-wing potential charted on a 0 to 60,000 axis, left-wing potential on a 0 to 40,000 axis, so Dobrindt presented 2.7% growth as if it should be read as 25% growth instead
Jun 2025. Same report, preface Erase. Faeser’s 2023 finding that right-wing extremism is the greatest extremist threat deleted, while right-wing potential rose 25% to 50,250 and right-wing violent crime rose 47%. Left-wing violence fell 26.8%. No justification given
Sep 2025. BfV, BKA, BND and BAMAD joint warning on Russian Wegwerf-Agenten recruited online for arson against energy, rail, transport and logistics Erase. His own agencies named the commissioning state and the target list. His public attribution for attacks on that target list stayed on the left
Sep 2025. Johannisthal, two pylons, ~50,000 households dark for 60 hours Rule. Left-extremist within the hour, Vulkangruppe accepted as domestic. Fifteen years under that banner, zero convictions
Jan 2026. Lichterfelde cable bridge, ~45,000 households without heat in a freeze Rule. Told ZDF there were “no indications” of Russia before the investigation concluded
Jan 2026. Same case, response Aim. Announced expanded surveillance of the linksextreme Szene only, vowed to “hit back” at left extremists
Jun 2026. Reutlingen substation, ~30,000 without power, three burn points, cut fence Rule. Anonymous Sicherheitskreise fed “links” to dpa within hours while the police at the lectern said every direction was open, technical fault included
Jul 2026. Verfassungsschutzbericht 2025 press release Inflate. Cited the January Berlin fires as proof of “the perfidious methods of violent left extremists”. The case had a claim letter and an open investigation. He counted it as evidence. Same release: right-wing potential up another 17% to 58,700, violent right-wing potential 15,600 against 11,600 on the left
Jul 2026. BMI 691-page Referentenentwurf Aim. Federal counterintelligence powers pointed at domestic political groups, powers asserted first, threat validation and review treated as friction
Jul 2026. CSD Tiergarten van attack, 25 July Fail. Attacker well known to authorities, attack preventable
Sep 2026. Jänschwalde, Bergheim, Dormagen, suspect at large Rule. Named “Klimaextremismus” on day three while the investigation still listed foreign state involvement as an open direction

Four infrastructure attacks in twelve months?

Four verdicts before evidence.

Every verdict pointed the same way without evidence, and some with evidence against the early verdict.

What Friday Did Not Explain

Set the man’s letter aside for a moment and look at the operation. The authorities themselves told the taz that Jänschwalde required considerable technical know-how and several days of preparation at the site. Then the same method appeared 550 kilometers away in Bergheim the same night, then Dormagen two days later, with police deployments in Sachsen near Spremberg and a false alarm in Niedersachsen.

Brandenburg’s interior minister Jan Redmann said after the second attack it could be a coordinated assault on the energy supply and announced a security center. The CDU’s own interior spokesman Alexander Throm said on Wednesday the clustering of attacks right before the Landtagswahlen in Sachsen-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin was extremely conspicuous and the goal was clearly to unsettle the population.

The taz reached the obvious conclusion on Wednesday: the pattern argued against the Vulkangruppe and for state commissioning (Russia, duh). The name never fit for what it claimed, and I have explained in detail how it has all the hallmarks of Russia, but taz still got there on operational grounds alone

Then on Friday a 48-year-old from Gevelsberg appeared, and Dobrindt had his Einzeltäter.

Here is what the archive of the last twelve months says about that. In September 2025 four federal agencies, two of them under Dobrindt, published a template.

Russian services recruit untrained locals through messenger apps, pay them small sums, hand them a task and a cover story, and let them be caught.

The recruit often never learns who paid. The February 2025 Be Greener operation was the proof of concept on German soil: more than 270 vehicles vandalized by FSB-recruited hands, framed as climate activism, timed to an election. False-flag environmentalism has already been run in Germany, in the open, and attributed by German investigators.

Hello, is this thing on?

A lone climate actor and a disposable recruit handed a climate cover story write identical letters. Both include the ideology. Both include the method. This one included the Klarname and the home address, which a cell protects and an asset gets exposed. The letter described the rockets in detail, which is what a cell hides and a seeding operation publishes. None of that proves a handler. All of it means the discriminator is the arrest and the phone.

Dobrindt ruled before either existed.

The timing sits on top. Within days of Dobrindt and Wadephul standing at a podium to formally attribute the Leipzig airport drone to Russia, the grid was hit in two Länder. Dobrindt can say Russia when the target is a Ukrainian An-124 and a provider’s cell-tower logs hold him accountable (curses, foiled by evidence). When the target is a German coal plant, suddenly a basic standard of proof disappears.

Copperhead

Germans have a name for this minister from his last job. Münchhausen of broadband. As federal transport and digital minister he promised 50 Mbit/s for everyone by 2018, disbursed under two percent of the money, and backed Deutsche Telekom’s vectoring, which squeezed more signal out of the existing copper instead of laying glass.

Germany finished at the bottom of Europe on fiber, because of how Dobrindt assessed risk. He literally ran the country into far greater risk.

Every engineer in the country told him copper was the wrong answer. It was the answer that protected someone other than the public, so he fumbled and lost the ball, and called that his analysis. Imagine the Nationalelf (German national team) with a player constantly kicking the ball into his own goal and then pointing at a backwards scoreboard for a pay raise.

“Dobrindt cites incorrect figures on extremists”. Germans saw a minister loudly proclaim he can not see risk (pun not intended) and for some reason did not fire him on the spot. Source: Berliner Zeitung

That decision rule did not change when the portfolio did. Threat attribution is infrastructure risk management with a different unit of measure. The left is copper. It is the incumbent narrative of his party, the one that keeps CSU voters from drifting to a party further right, the one that costs nothing to say and requires no response from the federal government beyond a press conference and a surveillance expansion. Russia is fiber. It is expensive, it is the correct answer, and saying it out loud obliges a state to act.

Now look at what runs on the fiber he declined to build. Substation monitoring. Drone detection at Leipzig, which failed, and the Funkzellenabfrage that had to substitute for it afterward. The KRITIS-Dachgesetz that Reul was defending on ZDF the same week. The 360-Grad-Sicherheitszentrum Redmann promised Brandenburg. All of it is telemetry, and telemetry travels on the network Dobrindt starved for four years so that copper wouldn’t be upgraded.

Let me get technical for a minute, because I need Germans to understand what Russia gets from Dobrindt’s fiber delay. It’s specific and it matters.

Copper is simple metal, which means a simple clamp can tap into it without a break and without a trace. This is old craft the Russians know well. From 1971 the US Navy kept an inductive pod on a Soviet copper cable in the Sea of Okhotsk for a decade, no cut, no loss, nothing Moscow could measure, and it ended only because a traitor took money to expose the American methods. Fiber runs on light a network can meter, so a tap is something different the operator can detect, while a silent copper clamp has no fiber equivalent.

What it means is Dobrindt’s infrastructure vectoring decision was far worse than just forcing Germany to stew in slow and vulnerable copper. Telekom’s own count for the Nahbereich build alone is over 30,000 powered, unattended cabinets exposed to adversaries who walk the public pavement, converting light back to copper behind a standard industry key. A passive fiber network would have put no powered electronics on the street at all, only unpowered splitter cabinets with nothing in them that a cheap Russian clamp can read.

How the Copperhead’s vectoring exposes German privacy, on the back of a cake and coffee napkin it deserves. Every single powered cabinet on the left is vulnerability at street level, expanding upwards of 30,000 by Telekom’s own count. The light splitter on the right has nothing in it that a clamp can expose. Germany dropped its pants on network architecture just as Russia was warming up their attacks.

The Germans look like technologically backward fools. They should have deployed a passive fiber network for many reasons, not least of all because incumbents being incumbents means the country is mis-aligned with basic national security requiring technology changes. You don’t go into a “grey zone” hybrid war with Russia by leaving everyone exposed.

Dobrindt drove a hard line to keep the medium that taps silently with the worst possible architecture, multiplying the exposed areas to break privacy. His failure to deploy the fiber, undermining national security, has turned now into a growing failure on everything that runs on the delayed fiber.

American had a word for this kind of politician during the Slaveholder Rebellion.

Copperheads.

Broad-banded Copperhead: Agkistrodon laticinctus
“Andy Johnson Warming Up the Frozen Snake (Copperhead) of Rebellion,” cartoon, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, October 28, 1865, House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/44590.

They were the politicians who wore the Union’s colors, sat in Union legislatures, and spent their time insisting the real enemy was abolitionists ending slavery, despite an enemy actually shooting at them in the field to preserve and expand slavery.

It’s the English word for a snake that strikes without any rattle, and also because of the copper coin some of them wore as a badge. Like how Dobrindt keeps showing up in the headlines, they were loyal to their right-wing backward-thinking party, and yet tried to say that meant loyalty to the country. The Copperheads were defenders of an old order, refusing to admit the threat had changed, and they cost their country dearly.

A minister who looked at copper and glass and chose copper? Come on. Who looked at 11,200 violent left extremists one year and 11,200 the next and called that a significant rise. Are you kidding me? The guy who looked at Roman naming conventions, Russian grammar, and a GRU contractor called Vulkan and couldn’t figure out Vulkangruppe is about as German as a bear speaking Russian? Who looked at twenty rockets across two Länder, a suspect on the run, and an open foreign-state line of inquiry, and saw a single climate activist? Jeezus. How is this guy still in office? Have the Germans no shame? Wait, I think we know that answer.

Reul said a name on the letter does not make that one man responsible. The name on the ministry should.