My SO is a journalist in Germany. She's all over this. Not clear if there are any clear "scandals". Would be fantasticly German if absolutely nothing fishy shows up.
In the US that would probably just lead to a minor apology. I remember a teutophone math professor mentioning that when she was explaining how serious plagiarism was.
After the Guttenberg scandal a wiki sprung up which investigated more past academic works from people, first mostly politicians.
Now, plagiarism is a serious issue, but these politicians were not “faking” their academic records. They actually had those titles, the universities had just failed to identify their plagiarism and given them the titles in spite of it.
As such hacking them won’t likely reveal such scandals, only actually looking at those (already public) academic works and searching for plagiarism will … which is what has already been happening.
—
† Annette Schavan resigned two years earlier because of plagiarism-accusations, so his wasn’t the first case, even when only looking at recent cases.
'Faking' is a word not even strong enough. Those people acquired titles by fraud and deception.
Schavan resigned in 2013, two years after Guttenberg.
They basically just doxxed them, put up photos, names, account info of famous people, politicians and their families (at one point publishing photos and personal data of the little children of the host of a German late night show), and for a handful of them also published their entire iCloud content as well as all messages they ever sent/received on social media.
There's nothing fishy in there, just a very unethical and bad hack. Especially considering the hack only targeted left-wing people[1] a political motivation isn't be out of the question.
Footnotes:
[1] The hack targeted all parties that were at the time in parliament, but also many private people such as musicians, artists, TV hosts, etc. All of these people were politically left-leaning.
In addition to hacking the systems of political parties, they also hacked many left-wing musicians, artists, TV hosts of late night shows, etc.
I've clarified my original post with a footnote.
But here in Germany, CDU was always considered "right".
For example, CDU/CSU politicians didn't want gay people to call what they have a "marriage". Merkel said so back in 2017, and eventually voted against the law together with more than 2/3rds of her party; the law passed anyway with the votes of the CDU's coalition partner SPD and the opposition parties. So there are some commonalities with the US right wing politicians and their policies, after all.
1) not true, FDP and CDU are certainly not left-wing
2) even if it were true, would it be more ethical to hack right-wingers?
The current speculation indicates no political leaning whatsoever (apart from one password of one leak for one socialist politician was "linkenshit" which could be either neutral, positive or negative).
Considering the age of the leaked data, it is speculated that during the time of gathering data, the AfD was not part of the targeted parliaments.
I guess the thinking is "it's targeted against one side, so probably look at the other to find the perp". Would be just as true with hacked right-wingers.
(and the corollary: "it's a flag-flag operation by the very same side, so look there", which also comes up no matter what side is affected)
As mentioned in the footnote, I was referring to the individuals hacked, not the parties. In addition to the political parties, the hack also targeted youtubers, artists, musicians, etc.
These include Christian Ehring, Jan Böhmermann, Oliver Welke (all hosts of left-leaning late night or satire shows), Marteria, Casper, K.I.Z. (left-leaning rappers/music groups, or in case of K.I.Z. even explicitly anti-capitalist), and several YouTubers.
Additionally, the twitter account doing the hacks has mocked Böhmermann's Reconquista Internet explicitly.
The problem is that any side was targeted.
How badly I wish this was true in other parts of the world!
The law was changed in 2002, where it was still legal in non-German context and not concerning foreign public officers. Now that is illegal too.
That doesn't mean there is non though, I wish it was true in Germany as well.
I've never been to Germany, but from what I've read/heard, Germany will probably score pretty high by my standard
There's also things like John Stossel's short documentary on setting up businesses in HK and in India.
While I am against cheating, of course, I have to think that having all those cars junked just due to that scandal was a far bigger waste and far worse for the environment.
It was about sending a message. And probably also about the fact that VW is a foreign car manufacturer. Let's not forget the bailouts that the American car companies got just a few years ago.