

The German police raided the German Pirate Party's servers; they claimed that the GPP was running an EtherPad instance that was being used by Anonymous activists to plan an attack on French energy giant EDF*. The German Bremen elections are coming up soon, and the German police seizure went well beyond taking the EtherPad instance for forensic purposes; the GPP (who had a member in the last German Parliament) have been severely put out at a critical juncture.

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."

German police seize Pirate Party servers, looking at Anon's toolkit

*If they were, I wouldn't shed a tear. EDF provides the power to our flat here in London. Last year, during the "big freeze" (when temperatures plummeted to subzero levels), our power went out. My wife and daughter were in Toronto, but I was home — and freezing. I called EDF to report the outage, and they explained because my wife's name was on the bill, the Data Protection Act prohibited them from accepting a report of a power-outage. This is, of course, complete bullshit — and the fact that they were prepared to let me freeze rather than take note of my service outage has left me pretty unsympathetic to their woes.