SO36 statement regarding yesterday's raids
Hello,
this is a short statement from SO36.NET regarding yesterday’s raids of our server space.
a short summary of the circumstances:
at 8am yesterday, Wednesday (9.5.07) over 900 civil servants and police raided groups involved with the mobilisation in the run up to the G8 summit in Heiligendamm.
just as was to be expected, all the participants of the accompanying protests – including ngos, radical leftist organisations, churches, unions jumped into the parliamentary mad house, scorning this interference in matters that is their very own business.
we would like to refer to the pertinent publication, if there is a further need for information, and to share with you a treat from the search warrant signed by the honourable judge Hebenstreit:
“… to disturb or prevent the upcoming world economic summit (g8) in the early summer 2007 in Heiligendamm with (…) violent actions. these criminal offences are meant to shake the existing social and economical order in the federal republic of Germany, and could severely damage especially the international position of the federal republic of Germany as a reliable partner in the group of the eight most important economic nations.”
exactly – we’re all over that.
chronology of the raid:
at about 8.15am the office floor that includes our server space was visited by about 10 riot officers and also 10 BKA (federal criminal police) officers. (a office user managed to open the door, right before they would have violently broken in)
at about 8.50 am we were able to enter the rooms under the chaperon of our lawyer. at this time 3 BKA officers were already inside the server room and had as first measure cut the internet connection at the cable. Their second measure was to deactivate the installed webcam by likewise disconnecting the power source. They had not yet taken hold of the servers themselves. Obviously they were still in a phase of orientation.
The BKA technicians demanded the disclosure of all root passwords and total access to all systems.
Following our declination of this demand they declared their intention to empty and take away all racks.
After an intervention of the lawyer in attendance and a conversation with the prosecutor present, they declared their investigative interest to be directed at ‘the mailboxes’. After further negotiations this was narrowed down to the 22 email-addresses, that were associated with 10 persons, all named on the search warrant.
In addition to the email-addresses they also demanded access to 2 mailing lists, named on the warrant and 7URLS / webdirs.
We decided in this situation to turn over the precise data named in the warrant. This had to be a choice of two evils – but noncompliance would have resulted in the confiscation and thus the exposure of nearly all the data on our servers.
After this decision we provided the BKA technicians with a root-shell. The portable server they had brought along was supposed to be integrated into the net in order to copy data over scp. This proved to pose a major problem to the technicians of the BKA for a lengthy amount of time. After reading the manuals and finding out about the meaning of netmasks, they copied the demanded and packed mailboxes to their server. (in the course of the other raids, three addresses were added to this list)
After the complications with ifconfig and netmask had been repeated twice, they also copied the requested data of the mailing lists and webdirectories.
During the whole length of the process of copying we were monitoring the bka experts and can confirm that except for the data named on the search warrant, no further data was copied.
the affected persons will be/were notified by us.
greetings from the SO36.NET