German Member of Parliament Hans-Christian Ströbele visited Washington D.C. to attend the Parliamentary Intelligence-Security Forum hosted by the U.S. House of Representatives from September 17 to September 19, 2014. In the light of recent controversies concerning cyber-crimes, phone tapping and intelligence cooperation, the conference addressed data protection and -security as well as the use of intelligence for national safety.
Biography
Hans-Christian Ströbele is a member of the German Bundestag for the German Green Party. He serves on the Control Committee for Monitoring State Intelligence Services as well as on the Committee for Law and Consumer Protection. Additionally, Mr. Ströbele is an associate member of the N.S.A. investigative Committee of the Bundestag, the Investigative Committee for European Law and the Federal Foreign Committee.
Mr. Ströbele was born in 1939 in Halle/Saale, Germany. After completing his formal education and one year of civil service, he graduated with a degree in Law and Political Science from the Freie Universität Berlin in 1961.
In 1969, he began practicing as a lawyer in Berlin as part of the Socialist Lawyers Collective and continued doing so until its disbandment ten years later. From 1970 until 1974, he also acted as a defender for political detainees of the Red Army Faction, for which he later was convicted in 1980. In the same year, Hans-Christian Ströbele co-founded the Alternative List for Democracy and Environmental Protection which later became part of Alliance90/The Greens. He served as member of the German Bundestag from 1985 until 1987 and re-entered the national parliament in 1998.
Hans-Christian Ströbele has become well known for advocating for the preservation of civil rights and his commitment concerning internal security policy as well as data and environmental protection in the Bundestag. In October 2013, Mr Ströbele met with Edward Snowden in Moscow to discuss the possibility of the NSA whistleblower testifying before a parliamentary committee set to investigate the claims of US intelligence services tapping into cell phone calls of German government officials.