German police raid a libertarian's home for the crime of calling civil servants "parasites," advise him to "Think carefully about what you post in future"

A new insane German speech crime investigation just dropped.

On 29 September of this year, a German man of libertarian persuasion known only by the pseudonym Damian N. tweeted the following:

No, anyone who is financed by the state pays no net taxes; they live off taxes: Every civil servant, every politician, every employee in a state-owned enterprise, everyone who is subsidized and financed by the state. Not a single parasite pays any net taxes.

You can find the tweet here; as I write this, it has a grand total of 402 views and ten likes.

No matter: Yesterday morning, police acting on behalf of the Ulm public prosecutor’s office raided Damian’s home. He is suspected of the crime of inciting hatred (in violation of Section 130 of the German Criminal Code) for his rough remark about government “parasites.”

Apollo News reports:

“At almost exactly 6 a.m., my doorbell rang. I went to the intercom and heard: ‘Police, please open the door, we have a search warrant,’” N. recounts.

“They then gave me a choice: ‘Either you unlock your cell phone and give us the PIN, and we’ll take the cell phone with us, or we’ll take everything.

“Under pressure, I naturally cooperated, unlocked my cell phone, and gave them the PIN,” he said. The officers then took Damian N. to the police station for identification procedures. “The whole program,” said N.: “Weight, height, photos from many angles, and all the biometric data from my hands. I felt like a serious criminal.” The police also asked for a blood sample – “for your DNA,” as one officer is reported to have said. N. refused. “I thought I hadn’t heard right.”

The identification procedures – roughly comparable to a police booking in the United States – were likely illegal in this case. Damian N. further claims that the police produced no search warrant and provided no receipt for his confiscated phone, which would represent a further violation of the law. Before leaving, an officer instructed our suspected speech criminal to “Think carefully about what you post in future,” because “You must realise that you are now under observation.”

This has all the hallmarks of another NGO-driven speech investigation. We have a low-visibility post containing a suggestive vocabulary item (“Parasit”) that was likely uncovered via keyword search, a lazy attempt to find a distantly relevant criminal statute and then maximum police harassment and intimidation because as in all these cases the process is most of the punishment. They really, really like the 6am morning raids, and they also really like to confiscate phones. As the Lower Saxon prosecutor (and “online hate task force” leader) Frank-Michael Laue told American reporters earlier this year, “It’s a kind of punishment if you lose your smartphone, it’s even worse than the fine you have to pay.”

UPDATE: I should clarify that the statute in play here criminalises inciting hatred against “a national, racial, religious group or a group defined by their ethnic origin.” It’s very hard indeed to understand how saying anything at all about government employees could possibly run afoul of this statute.