German Police Seize German Pirate Party Servers 121
fph il quozientatore writes "The German police have seized today the servers from the German Pirate Party after an attack on the French company EDF. Apparently they are looking for evidence of allegiance with the Anonymous group. In completely unrelated news, the website of the German police was down this afternoon."
Re:Just like the good old days (Score:5, Informative)
Some notes about this (Score:5, Informative)
The summary is very uninformative. This needs to be mentioned:
- The reason for the seizure was topic of speculation all day long. It was very soon suspected that the reason was abuse of the "piratenpad", a publically available etherpad installation operated by the pirate party. Apparently this platform was used to coordinate a DDoS attack against the french energy and utility company (according to Wikipedia the largest of the world) EDF. Pirate party later stated that a SSH key for there webserver was posted on the piratenpad. See http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Polizei-kapert-Server-der-Piratenpartei-1246963.html [heise.de] (german).
- This service was only running on one of the servers but the police took all servers nethertheless which includes their mail and other important infrastructure.
- The seizure was not the result of some german investigation but rather a reaction to a judicial assistance request by the french police.
- As well-known german lawyer Udo Vetter points out (http://www.lawblog.de/index.php/archives/2011/05/20/ein-akt-der-deutschen-behrden/ - german) the german police was not required by law to react in this way. Furthermore political parties are somewhat protected by law and it is very arguable that the measures taken were adequate as required by law.
- There is a state election in the German state of Bremen on Sunday. The pirate party is running there. This seizure is of course very unfortunate in light of this. This has promptly caused conspiracy theories that the reason for the seizure might be political.