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The ninth edition of the Big Brother Awards Germany ceremony took place on 24 October 2008 in Bielefeld, Germany. The "Oscars for data leeches" event was organized by EDRi-member FoeBuD that gave seven negative awards.

The Big Brother Award 2008 in the "Europe/EU" category went to The Council of the European Union (EU Ministers Council) in Brussels for the EU terror list. On this list, numerous organisations and individual persons have been labelled as "terrorists" and placed under strict sanctions, leading to severe violations of human rights. There has been neither a democratic mandate for establishing this data collection, nor is it administrated with any democratic control. For a long time, the people affected have not even been given a legal hearing, let alone legal protection against this stigmatisation by the authorities.

The "Health and Social Services" category prize was won by the Deutsche Angestellten-Krankenkasse ("German Employees' Health Insurance", DAK, a statutory health insurer) for the unauthorised sharing of 200.000 chronically ill patients' data with a private company, without giving information to the insurance customers or asking for their consent.

The BigBrotherAward 2008 in the category "Consumers" went to the members of the 16th German Bundestag (the Lower House in Germany's Federal Parliament) for waving through a number of laws which enforce the collection, long-term storing and sharing of detailed data of travellers. A similar prize in the "Consumers" category was also received by the Work Group of German Market and Social Research Institutes for their recommendation in a guideline to have consumer interviews by telephone monitored secretly, and to continue propagating this illegal guideline even after protests from the data protection authorities.

Deutsche Telekom AG also won an award in the "Workplace and Communications" category for their illegal use of telecommunication connections data to snoop on Telekom supervisory board members and journalists

In "Technology" category, the Yello Strom GmbH (Ltd) was hailed as the winner for their pioneering role in introducing digital electricity technology for private customers. With this technology, electricity consumption can be registered with single-second accuracy for each household and even for individual devices, potentially leading to a detailed surveillance of activities in the home.

Ministry of Economy and Technology also received the "Politics" section award for passing the law about the ELENA procedure und the associated forced introduction of the electronic signature.

Big Brother Awards Germany 2008
http://www.bigbrotherawards.de/

Winners BBA Germany 2008
http://www.bigbrotherawards.de/2008