In cooperation with French officials, German police have raided the offices of the German Pirate Party and confiscated all of the organization’s servers in connection with an alleged future attack currently being planned by hacker collective Anonymous.
French investigators requested the aide of German authorities after tracing one of the tools used by Anonymous, an open source text collaboration tool known as PiratenPad, to the Pirate Party’s systems. It is currently unclear, however, why all of the organization’s servers have been taken offline if the investigation does not reach beyond PiratenPad.
German Pirate Party officials released a statement condemning the seizure of their systems two days before a major election:
The [Pirate Party] Board does not have information that indicates the necessity to take all servers of the Pirate Party off-line. According to the information it has been provided with, only one single public service on a virtual server of the party was affected. The disconnection of all servers is a massive intrusion into the communications infrastructure of the sixth largest party in Germany. Considering the state elections taking place in Bremen in two days, this caused a severe political damage, which the Board condemns decisively.
In relation to the ongoing investigations, it will have to be verified whether the issued search warrant was actually appropriate, especially whether the principle of proportionality was followed. After all, this action has led to a large-scale breakdown of the technical infrastructure of the Pirate Party Germany. It will also have to be verified whether data have been affected that have no relation to the French investigation.
Rick Falkvinge, founder of the first Pirate Party in Sweden also spoke out against the actions of the German Police handling the case.
"Doing this to a democratic party—Germany’s sixth largest, actually—two days before an election is nothing short of a democratic sabotage,” Falkvinge wrote in a post on his activism website. “This shows why we must introduce understanding of information policy into the justice system all across Europe. A computer is not just something you can carry away; doing so has consequences. It is not a wrench, and yet the law (and police) treat it like any tool, just like a wrench."
Following the outcry, members of Anonymous quickly retaliated against German authorities by launching a DDoS attack on their police website. Members of Germany’s Pirate Party were not flattered by the Anonymous action, however, and distanced themselves from that attack.
The real question now is whether the confiscation of the German Pirate Party servers was a badly-timed overreaction or a politically corrupt attempt to sabotage the group? Something tells me that there is more to this story that we have yet to see.
