Pirate Party Official Raided after Uncovering State Trojan
Written by Ernesto on September 17, 2008The spokesperson of the German Pirate Party saw his house raided after the party published a leaked document which showed that the government uses a homemade “trojan” to wiretap Skype conversations. In addition, a server from another party member was seized.
The Pirate Party is known for it’s battle against the ever increasing government surveillance on the public. So, when an anonymous whistleblower sent them a internal document which showed that the government went as far as installing trojans on computers, they didn’t hesitate to publish it.
German authorities weren’t too happy about the leak, which might be illegal according to a criminal law specialist, and went after the source. Earlier this week police searched the home of the Pirate Party spokesperson where they hoped to find more information. In addition to the home search, a server from another party member was seized. The server, however, was fully encrypted, so chances are low that it will uncover the whistleblower.
In a response, Andreas Popp, Chairman of the Bavarian Pirate Party said: “A brave person leaks documents to the Pirate Party, to inform the public about a procedure of the Bavarian Government, which is highly likely to violate the constitution. Now this persons is hunted like a criminal. Private rooms are raided, servers get seized.”
Pirate Parties around the world will continue to speak out against these, and other privacy threats. The trojan in question (German) was able to tap into Skype calls and intercept traffic to encrypted websites.
Previously: Danish ISPs Reject Anti-Piracy Proposals
Next: Norbits Hackers Threaten to Release User Info
57 Responses
Damn… someone does good work to prevent others breaking laws and what happens? Stuff gets “seized” (stolen is more accurate) and people’s homes get raided… because they told the truth about an ILLEGAL government project!
Damn german politics, that’s what started all this trouble… all the information transfer intercepting and whatnot…
Wow, this is sad. Pretty soon just putting Pirate Party as your affiliation will get you raided.
It’s not really about Skype, but a general-purpose backdoor. Concerning Skype there apparently has been some political pressure to provide a skype-taping backdoor right into the application according to a report to “Lawful Interception of IP-based services” on 25th of June in Austria.
News article (German): http://www.heise.de/security/news/meldung/113281
You know, I did once wonder that if we all went to say skype of something like that, the police would lose the ability to tap your phone. Seems they are trying to get it back, but thankfully people will always have ways to check now.
“German authorities weren’t too happy about the leak, which might be illegal according to a criminal law specialist, …”
Just like it was unconstitutional and thus completely illegal to use trojans and cracking methods (they intercepted the Skype connections through Man-In-The-Middle attacks) to spy on their citizens. None of this is based in German law, the new law the German secret service wanted to pass was harshly criticized in some circles. The whole world has told Germany not to make the same mistakes again and to “Never Forget” … and now all of it is in full gear again.
Great Job Mrs. Merkel, Thanks very much Mr. Schäuble.
MSN Encryption
http://www.secway.fr/us/
Well, its a start init…
A little more authoritarian government than we think. Do not the Germans value their liberties?
Roze
http://www.28chan.org/apstdt/
I can’t wait to see the Bavarian government stand up in a court of law and explain this.
Matthew Hughes
http://www.matthewhughes.co.uk
Sweet, can’t wait to see what America will do to Pirate Party members. While the leaking of the document is probably illegal, the government should definitely get called out on this trojan business. I thought installing viruses on peoples computers was illegal. I also thought people are supposed to be told when there’s an investigation on them (at least unless it’s about national security, but BitTorrent isn’t a national security risk anywhere).
This is another bit of disturbing news, how can a ’skype’ trojan be allowed, surely as it’s a trojan it’s not used to target individuals directly but just collect information in general. The info is sketchy but…
What if this malware ended up on the computer of a citerzen outside of germany? or even a goverment machine of aother country? couldn’t that be considered an act of war even?
software pirates deserve to be prosecuted with the full force of the law
any organisation that promotes the rights of criminal activity should be subject to intense police scrutiny
down with piracy, long live filesharing
http://www.h33t.com where pirates are not welcome
H ahah a
they got 0wned :)
stup1d criminals
Its just a matter of time before a new axis of evil speech is given, with new maps… and somehow we are going to see that there are pirate party HQ next to each of these “hotspots”.
Dont be suspicious… its all a coincidence.
DO NOT BREAK THE LAW (Since we are lawkeepers, we can break the law… but YOU DONT BREAK THE LAW. Period)
Hypocrites.
Just typical politics. shows the Pirate Party over there was gaining some ground. They will attack them any way they can to keep control over peoples lives. The world is an evil place indeed.
@1: “Damn… someone does good work to prevent others breaking laws and what happens? Stuff gets “seized” (stolen is more accurate”
ACTUALLY, “sharing” is more accurate. Stop being such a crybaby. Everything that can be shared, should be. Your social security number, your mother’s address, your bank account numbers, all of it. It’s all culture and culture wants to be free.
@15
The difference is that they can be used to commit fraud (i. e. pretend to have the address, bank account, social security number, etc.), whereas nobody is pretending to be the creator of whatever file is being shared in file-sharing.
@P1RATE: Your social security number, your mother’s address, your bank account numbers are not culture. Look it up.
@12, yeah, you’re exactly right.
The government are criminals.
they may not be pretending to be the creator but they are depriving the creator of potential income when they “share” it so anyone with an internet connection can have access to a product that was intended to be sold. stealing and fraud are interrelated. you are pretending to have the same rights as the content creator when you really don’t. the entire pirate belief system is anti content-creator.
What the heck is this world coming to. Reading just the headline was appalling enough, let alone the article.
If this is how Germany treats minor political parties, I’d hate to see what happened if the Pirate Party ever gained any ground in the US.
Shameful gestapo tactics from the German government. They should be doubly prosecuted for trying to cover up their illegal actions.
@8
HA!
Next time use Wikileaks!
I’m joining the Pirate Party now.. These guys are fighting for that last freedoms we have.
@ 19
The “pirate belief system” is not anti-creator, it is anti-corporate middlemen.
Producing something with the intention of selling it isn’t “art” but “manufacturing”, even though the product may have some artistic merit.
The majority of pirates out there do actually respect the creator for their CREATIVITY but don’t have respect for the commercial aspect of distribution which is a totally separate thing.
@ 19
People like the RIAA are anti-creator, as you say it. Just take a look at the Shareaza-case.
@15
lol communist
Wow, so the plot thickens! WTF man!
Jiff
http://www.anonymize.us.tc
Pretty ironic how the government would pirate the pirate party’s stuff.
Can someone link to or host the documents somewhere for everyone to view? i don’t even know what to search for, but would really like to view the docs.
governments around the world are out of control; their purpose is to serve the people. this sort of behavior surely does not follow the traditional doctrine of what government is supposed to be.
@ #30
The original document is still linked from the german pirate party page.
You can download it here:
http://wiki.piratenpartei.de/images/5/54/Bayern-skype-tkue.pdf
However, it’s in German.
i am from germany and all i have to say is that the development in politics really scares me.
surveillance everywhere (police+cameras) and now also internet communication logged. breaking into our privacy, our homes under the pretext of the danger of terrorism.
and most of the people are so brainwashed by mass media that they believe it - or are not interested in what is happening anyway.
sad. what can we do?
Bloody hell. Alex Jones might be right. The worlds governments have been corrupted and taken over by the Illuminati.
Damn, it sounds like Germany is censoring basic freedoms even more so than the United States is when it comes to civilian privacy and free speech.
Conspiracy theorists used to sound insane, but if governments are going to behave in such a manner what do they expect us to think? Come on, this is Europe…not fucking China!
Governments exist to promote the general welfare, not to spy on their own loyal citizens.
You’d think their time would be better spent hunting for real criminals…what else the hell do we pay taxes for?
Check out the movie 1984, or just read the book by George Orwell.
I’m not putting up with this crap from our Governments, i’m joining the local Pirate Party. They atleast stand for freedom and democracy. I would urge everyone to join their local parties, even just to show some support for our freedoms.
“the entire pirate belief system is anti content-creator.”
no, it’s pro-freedom… i’m sorry if you don’t want freedom, but we do.
“Governments exist to promote the general welfare, not to spy on their own loyal citizens.”
Never in history and not in the future. They exist to serve themselves.
Betcha they try to justify this with that tired old ‘but it’s for the war on terror’ argument - all our western governments have always had the ability to listen in on our telephone and mobile phone conversations, whether they openly admit it or not, but now technology has come along and mixed it right up with voice over ip, and our terrorist west-hating jihadists are all apparently using it for their evil planning now instead of mobiles because it’s so much more secure and difficult to listen in on. So it’s not really surprising that a western government has developed a way to ‘wire-tap’ voice-over-ip. So the way they’ve implemented it is a bit questionable, but tbh communications monitoring has been around since wire-comms was invented. They’ll tell us: Either put up, or shut up (and you can already see how far they’re willing to go to enforce it). And if you can’t do that, we’ll all get blown up. Meh… whatever happens you know where we’re all headed anyways…
You guys act like the German government is any different from the American government… The ONLY DIFFERENCE, is that Germany seeked a illegal method to keep surveillance on its people.
The united states made it LEGAL to install backdoors in all ip services, routers, computers, and any piece of software that is commercially distributed.
The only difference here is that germany has more rights than america does at the moment. Godam slavemasters.
Great post, keep up the good work!
TorrentEye: http://www.torrenteye.com
This crap only keeps getting worse. When the hell will people realize that the governments are powerless when it matters? It is the citizens of each country that possess the real power. After all, someone has to pay these politicians and “leaders” salary and someone has to follow their commands.And we certainly outnumber them by quite a large margin. Germany can suck the MPAA and RIAA’s balls all they want, it only shows how corrupt and flawed they are, just like the US, and like Canada keeps trying to do.
The only hope
join pirate party
Welcome to the people’s republic of Germany!
Ooooh, so THAT’s why the government hired Sony executives!
Sadly, I think that this is gonna end the same as Sony’s case, indeed.
fucking nazis
this is really getting too 1984 …
and those people we vote?
@ Bilderberg:
Bush: Hey, Angie, heh! We need you to do somethin’ fer us! You know that party, hehe, the one with all the sailors? We need you to do something… *whispers in Merkl’s ear*…
Merkl: .. mm-hmm… Ja. Ja… Really, so soon? Ja, ist gut. Ist no problem…
Bush: Hehe, yeah we got an election this year and this will make us look real moderate.
it’s moironic to be listening in on your citizens back but if maybe 6% of those citizens happen to be hardcore Islamists then i bet it’s warranted to listen in on SIP sessions.It’s a necessary evil the government may argue.
I know where this shit’s headed ,Kill the pig and save the sheep ideology.
In the end most of us barely walk away numbed.
“Let’s Give A Fuck”
I said that.
Join your local Pirate Party people! It’s important! It’s so long since there’s been any real change in the corrupt Governments of the world. Let’s all join to bring some people power back into play.
One example about germany & internet.
Data security programs like Nmap are illagal in germany. The purpose with these kind of programs are to find those security issues from the systems. It was banned because, you’re able to use it wrong.
Since it’s a point that nobody seems to have made so far, governments can set up taps on physical phone lines, why should virtual ones be any different?
The problems that I have with this is firstly that they were trying to keep it secret and illegally seized equipment.
And secondly, since it’s a program, someone else could get hold of it.
Also @15 and 19.
When you share or copy, it doesn’t restrict ability to access, when you steal you physically take.
As for potential profits, I’m sorry that I haven’t given up eating yet because I decide I want to watch a TV show or listen to some music…
I waste most of my income as it is. Pay for the decent stuff, not for the overpriced trash.
Our governments are populated by criminals. The sooner you realize it the sooner we can destroy them and hunt them down like the dirt they are.
Glad you are a truly free now.
Denying the past, outlawing all Nazi references. Thats really helping you all out?
HEINRICH HIMMLER would be proud!
YOUR PAPERS! YOUR PAPERS SIR! HALT!
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pirat parti iz ilegal ive killd 20 ov teh sic basardz in canada
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