G7 leak: Pirate Party server seized by police

Against the backdrop of the publication of confidential documents from the planning staff of the 2015 G7 Summit in Elmau a few days ago, the police have now paralyzed the public infrastructure of the Pirate Party. The G7 leak thus has far-reaching consequences for the party.

G7 leak with consequence for Pirate Party

After last week classified as confidential documents of the police to the G7 summit 2015 in Elmau and the security concept at that time on the platform Indymedia were leaked, “the police on behalf of the Munich public prosecutor’s office seized two servers of the Pirate Party Germany on Wednesday to preserve evidence, thereby paralyzing a public service,” writes the Pirate Party on the own homepage.

For the publication of secret documents, they used, among other things, the CryptPad instance of the Pirate Party, which allows the public and free sharing of documents. Server hoster Hetzner was informed about the ongoing investigations and subsequently took the servers off the network, the party writes further.

The Munich II public prosecutor’s office confirmed the precedence in response to a request from the website Golem.de, stating that they had “data on two servers of the Pirate Party Germany seized” due to a court order.

The party itself provided law enforcement with a copy of the servers to avoid physical seizure and a long-term outage. The confidential files on the 2015 G7 summit in Elmau, Bavaria, where the meeting of industrialized nations is also being held this year, had been classified information.

Pirate Party criticizes action

Meanwhile, the Pirate Party of Germany sharply criticized the actions of the police. Inquiries regarding a cooperation or to the publication of the demanded data had simply not existed in the apron.

“Instead of approaching us, the police directly put the “gun on our chest”: the servers had to be taken off the network and all data had to be surrendered without restriction – or the servers would have been taken away,” says Anne Herpertz, chairwoman of the Pirate Party.

Due to the preservation of evidence, the services on the servers were not accessible for several hours. This is problematic in that the Pirate Party Germany after operator CryptPad itself provides the second largest instance of the web-based collaboration tool and in addition to party members “also many private individuals and NGOs rely on the fact that the service is offered reliably”.

Even the party’s normal web servers have been seized by police, the party continues. These host, among other things, sensitive member data that have nothing to do with the G7 leak.

The party is currently considering an appeal against the authorities’ decision. Together with the data protection commissioner, it is also informing those affected about the data leak. Further information and statements from the party will be published in the coming days.