Data confiscated from Pirate Party servers

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Logo of the Pirate Party at a party conference in 2014: »unproductive confiscation action«

Photo: Caroline Seidel/ dpa

Last weekend, confidential police documents from the G7 summit at Schloss Elmau near Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 2015 were published on the Internet, including several classified documents.

The published information should not have any mission-critical effects on the security of the current G7 summit in Elmau, which begins on Sunday.

Nevertheless, the public prosecutor's office has now confiscated data from the Pirate Party's servers.

According to party information on Friday, a service from the Pirate Party was used to publish the documents, which allows documents to be shared online publicly and free of charge.

The data itself was leaked via another platform, not by the Pirate Party itself. Apparently, only the Pirate Party's so-called CryptPad instance was used.

Similar to Google Drive or Microsoft Office, CryptPad can be used to create collaborative documents, but with encryption.

The project is supported by the EU, among others.

It does not belong to the Pirate Party itself, but they use the free program and offer their own version of it.

Other versions of CryptPad should not be affected by the police action and should continue to work.

The pirate party is named as a "third party" in the course of the investigation, said a spokeswoman for the Munich II public prosecutor's office of the German Press Agency.

The investigators themselves do not seem to assume that the Pirate Party itself is behind the leak.

The data on two servers were confiscated on Wednesday based on a court order, the spokeswoman said.

There were no further confiscations in the course of the investigation.

The federal chairwoman of the Pirate Party, Anne Herpertz, criticized the process: "The servers had to be taken off the network and all data released without restriction - or the servers would have been taken." Prior to this measure, there was no request for cooperation and release of the information sought , but directly a confiscation order.

Supposedly also sensitive user data affected

This not only affected the server on which the "CryptPad" service is operated, but also another one.

"It is not at all understandable why the public prosecutor's office arranged for the data to be tapped from the unaffected web server." Among other things, sensitive member data is stored there.

The prosecutor did not comment on the allegations.

The Pirate Party complained that the police couldn't do anything with the "CryptPad" data anyway, since all the information was encrypted.

"The non-targeted confiscation action fits into the picture of generally deep fundamental rights restrictions at the site of the summit," said the MEP of the Pirate Party, Patrick Breyer.

hpp/dpa