How German political spies mistook a random Berlin woman for a white nationalist troll, surveilled her for two years and got her fired for no reason

You think the problem with spy agencies is that they are clandestine organisations that get up to nefarious things in secret with little oversight, and that’s true. It’s one reason literally every other liberal democracy on earth, aside from Germany, keeps their spies away from their own citizens. It’s no good to have goons running around inventing novel political offences aGainST OuR DeMoCraCY and tapping the phones of random people who just don’t like mask mandates or are a little too fond of Chairman Mao or whatever.

Another even greater problem with spy agencies, however, is the fact that they very often turn out to be full of totally incompetent idiots who have no idea what they’re doing or to whom they’re doing it. This is particularly the case in Germany, where as I said above, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and its sixteen state chapters spend a lot of time snooping on ordinary Germans, and to the extent this is not the kind of thing normal upstanding well-adjusted employees are likely to find remotely tasteful, German domestic spies are a cut below the rest.

One of the ways you can tell this is true, is the oceans of time and paperwork our constitutional protectors spend investigating totally irrelevant micromovements and Nazi-obsessed randos with internet followings in the low triple digits. From 2019, the constitutional protectors developed an interest in WhiteDate.net, a cartoonish white nationalist dating platform run out of Germany with around 8,000 overwhelmingly male users (never good for a dating platform). Last year, somebody hacked the poorly secured website and released all its user data, which Antifa eagerly placed online in easily searchable format.

Now, when I first read about all this last year, I was mildly surprised, if only because I generally assume that the people most likely to be running sites like WhiteDate.net are none other than the constitutional protectors themselves. That’s one of many reasons you should stay the hell away from all platforms like this. The hack revealed, however, that domestic spies probably have little to do with this particular internet trap, although some oddities remain to be explained.

The true founder and animating personality of this online curio turns out to be a 57 year-old German woman named Christiane Horn. She operated WhiteDate.net together with two other white nationalist-themed networking websites, WhiteChild.net (no idea what that was) and WhiteDeal.net (for prospective employers to find “European staff”). While Horn put her own name on the company behind all of these websites, she presented herself to her users and on the samizdat internet pseudonymously, as “Liv Heide.”

The weird thing, as we read in this amazing investigative report from Die Zeit, is that Liv Heide is also a real person, just not the same person as Christiane Horn. The still weirder thing is that Heide and Horn have very similar biographies. Both women were born within two years of each other, and both grew up near Kiel in Schleswig-Holstein. Both moved to Berlin to pursue artistic careers in their youth, and they even seem to have met briefly sometime in the mid-1990s, which is probably where Horn picked up her “Liv Heide” alter-ego.

Whereas the real Heide stayed in Berlin, Horn soon moved to Paris where she became interested in the “pro-white movement” after the Islamist attacks on the Bataclan music club and the editorial offices of Charlie Hebdo. In 2017, Horn divorced her French-Jewish husband and moved back to her hometown in Schleswig-Holstein. There she opened her white nationalist websites and constructed her new online identity as Pseudo-Heide, while the real Heide worked as an assistant hundreds of kilometers to the south at the Hochschule für Wirtschaft und Recht (HWR) in Berlin. Before long, the real Heide got wind of Pseudo-Heide’s internet presence, primarily because people started asking her about it. To distance herself from Pseudo-Heide’s dangerous internet activities, the real Heide desperately included in her professional biography paeans to “people of different origins, cultures and religions” and her belief in the “power of diversity and respect.”

One of the most remarkable things about the constitutional protectors, is that while they are supposedly a real intelligence agency with all kinds of supersecret spy methods and supersecret spy machines at their disposal, they seem to do most of their spying by simply sitting on their asses and searching the internet all the time. In 2022, the HWR uploaded a staff profile of the real Liv Heide to their website, which the “Internet Procurement Department” of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution stumbled upon while running google searches for the “Liv Heide” of white nationalist fame. They forwarded their internet discovery to something called “Department 2D” in Cologne, “which” (according to Die Zeit) “is responsible for monitoring non-violent right-wing extremists in the digital space.” An employee in Department 2D then ran cursory checks and concluded baselessly that the “Liv Heide” behind WhiteDate.net and the Liv Heide who worked in Berlin were the same person, and that there were “actual indications” that this person was “pursuing anti-constitutional activities.”

The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution forwarded this urgent high-level intelligence that they got from Google to the Berlin Office for the Protection of the Constitution in January 2024, in a “Findings report” bearing the baffling file number II B – 042-S-590005-0121/2024. This report proclaimed that the operator of WhiteDate.net had been “clearly identified” as Liv Heide, and so the constitutional protectors in Berlin passed this information on to Heide’s employers, a frequent practice when these goons discover “right-wing extremists” in the civil service. Heide’s supervisors at HWR summoned the poor woman to a conference room at the end of the workday in June and promptly fired her. When Heide asked why she was being terminated, they asked her in turn what she knew about WhiteDate.net.

After her firing, Heide protested to the constitutional protectors, gave a sworn statement that she had nothing to do with WhiteDate.net and filed a complaint with the police for defamation. Eventually she got a lawyer, and four months after she lost her job the constitutional protectors finally agreed to review her case, at which point they realised their mistake. They finally informed the real Heide that their “suspicion had been confirmed that another person with the name Liv Heide had appeared in this context.” Nobody apologised, Heide never got her job back and to this day nobody involved wants to talk about this unfortunate case.

While the constitutional protectors subjected the real Liv Heide to pointless surveillance for the better part of two years, Christiane Horn continued to run WhiteDate.net wholly unmolested by domestic intelligence agents and the police until hackers took down her platform last year – although here at the plague chronicle we’ve seen that many people have been investigated and charged with political offences for far less than the content Horn has put about. That indeed is very strange. Another curiosity, is the fact that there never seems to have been much mystery as to Pseudo-Heide’s real identity; public records have listed “Christiane Horn” as the managing director of the company behind the related WhiteDeal.net website since 2017.

This story is very similar to a case I wrote about last November, involving an economist whom the constitutional protectors misclassified as a “potential right-wing extremist” because he spent the night at the wrong person’s house. While Heide was fired outright, our economist was merely suspended and subjected to a pointless Kafkaesque months-long investigation into his nonexistent political extremism. That case also unfolded in 2024, which was the height right-wing extremism hysteria in Germany.