Authorities appear to be concerned about a possible attack on French energy giant EDF. The German Pirate Party said in a statement that it does not believe itself to be a target of the investigation and expressed willingness “within its legal obligations” to aid French police:
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.
PiratenPad links in Anonymous chat rooms
The EtherPad Foundation, which coordinates development of the underlying technology, said today, "We entirely support PiratenPad in its struggle, we believe that EtherPad deployments and really-real time collaborative document editing should be a right for all people, great and small."
The group believes the main reason for the raid is “because PiratenPad was being used by the group Anonymous to organize an attack," but notes that even this particular EtherPad install was used for legitimate purposes such as "structured debates around the protests in Spain, so this is a major cause for concern from a libertarian perspective."
Anonymous' main communications tools have been hit hard in the last two weeks. The main Internet Relay Chat servers, run by a group called AnonOps, were taken over last week by a dissident member and have only recently been relocated to a different domain name, which continues to have "issues." Now comes the attack on PiratenPad, though an AnonOps leader says that "police.de wasn't my fault."
Rick Falkvinge, who heads the Swedish Pirate Party, came to the defense of his piratical brethren today, writing, "Doing this to a democratic party—Germany’s sixth largest, actually—two days before an election is nothing short of a democratic sabotage. 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."
In response to the takeover of its servers, the German Pirate Party has been tweeting up some sturm und drang today, and its "#servergate" hashtag is the second highest "trending" tag in Germany.
Not surprisingly, the main German police website is now down, as is the website of federal investigators (the BKA). As one Anon put it in a tweet, "#Anonymous to german police: 'Let me introduce myself...' #servergate #PoliceMeetsCocks."
But the German Pirate Party called the attacks inappropriate. "We condemn the totally inappropriate actions by investigators,” said Sebastian Mink, chair of the Chairman Pirate Party, “but these actions are not a reason to attack other websites and we distance ourselves from such attacks.”
Nate Anderson @'Ars Technica'
Both the police action and Anon's response have been called attacks. So let us compare.
ReplyDeletePolice action: Blanket seizure of
1. multiple servers used for
2. multiple purposes by
3. multiple groups and individuals, for
4. an unknown period of time
This infringed upon and impeded the exercise of the rights of many bystanders.
Anonymous response: Focused attention on
1. limited number of servers used for
2. general public information visited by
3. few individuals as a reference, for
4. known limited time
This may have inconvenienced a few people but did not actually prevent the police services from doing to their work.
The hyperventilating by affected parties has to stop.