Will Germany's Pirates be walking the plank? by Sam Bollier Berlin, Germany - Seven years ago, in the basement of a dimly lit hacker hangout near the banks of Berlin's Spree River, Germany's Pirate Party was founded. The place is named C-base, and it's one of several such "hackerspaces" in Germany's capital. Posters and stickers on the walls portray US whistleblower Edward Snowden, Star Trek actor DeForest Kelley, and a Lovecraftian sci-fi role-playing game, "Achtung! Cthulhu". C-base, the tongue-in-cheek legend goes, was built on the site of a 4.5 billion-year-old space station, and a tour guide proudly shows off fragments of a putative spaceship. (C-base is not officially affiliated with the Pirate Party.) C-base members - mostly young men - are busy coding, chatting, building, and even sewing. Photos are strictly verbotenhere, and Al Jazeera was requested to ring an "alien alarm" in an inner sanctum in the basement to inform members that "noobs" were present. Few would have imagined that a political party launched in this milieu - advocating seemingly niche issues such as internet freedoms and copyright law reform - would only a handful of years later win seats in four state parliaments and, for a brief period in 2012, become Germany's third-most-popular party [Ge]. [...] continua qui http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/09/2013921141745372648.html