How The Wind Rustles And The Acorns Fall: A Few Days Of Freedom!
On 29.08.2023, after almost 27 years of imprisonment, I was released from the high-security area of Freiburg prison with two hours notice. How does a person feel in such a situation? I would like to report on this after the first 14 days.
On 29.08.2023: The release!
At 8 a.m. I was still sitting in the visiting area of the prison with the probation officer, who might be responsible for me in the future, and we puzzled over when and if a release would take place. At 2 p.m. the time had come – I was discharged and on my way to my new place to live.
I should have been overflowing with happiness, but my focus was on the speedy handling of the move and my first official visits. Already around 3 p.m. I was at the job center and then at the health insurance company. The evening became long, ended after midnight. I got to know people in the new living environment, talked to friends on the phone and immediately started texting. The world of the 21st century had integrated me in a short time: thanks to the local group of the Rote Hilfe e.V. from Freiburg, my smartphone and laptop were ready. It felt surreal to sit on the tram and talk on the phone – just hours before I had sat in a cell with a corded phone and was only allowed to call numbers approved by the prison, and the conversations would be monitored and recorded, as it was always said in an announcement text before calls.
Continue reading How The Wind Rustles And The Acorns Fall: A Few Days Of Freedom! by Thomas Meyer-Falk -Freiburg (Germany)
disfigured by loggers, ravaged by energy companies, polluted by industrialists and colonized by accomplices of the Chilean state — the last few decades have been marked by unrelenting struggle.
Among the tedious publications that the French state releases every year to offer a semblance of democratic veneer is the annual report of the Commission Nationale de Contrôle des Techniques de Renseignement (CNCTR), the body created in 2015 to monitor the proper use of spying measures deployed by these agencies. The release of its 2022 Annual Report on June 15 may have passed somewhat unnoticed, but it’s still worth extracting a few bits of information. All the more so since the report details the official array of surveillance measures carried out on their own initiative, upstream and as a preventive measure, by all the intelligence agencies, leaving us to imagine how this expansion can then be translated into additional prolonged surveillance in a judicial rather than administrative framework (in the form of opening a preliminary investigation or inquiry, which the person who is targeted will not immediately be aware of).
