Accusation of data theft
NRW leftists denounce Wagenknecht’s comrades-in-arms
October 23, 2023, 1:05 p.m
Lukas Schön is the managing director of Sahra Wagenknecht’s association for building her own party. As “Stern” now reports, the North Rhine-Westphalia regional association of the Left is filing a complaint against him. He is said to have copied member data without permission.
The North Rhine-Westphalia state association of the Left has filed a criminal complaint against the managing director of the new Wagenknecht association, Lukas Schön, on suspicion of data theft. According to research by the magazine “Stern”, Schön is said to have copied the member files without authorization shortly before he left the position as managing director of the regional association.
Lukas Schön was managing director of the Left in North Rhine-Westphalia until November 2022. In this role he had access to the member file, including contact and address data for around 7,900 people. A few days after the incident it became known that Wagenknecht was not ruling out founding his own party. The regional association of the Left in North Rhine-Westphalia therefore filed a criminal complaint against Schön with the Düsseldorf public prosecutor’s office on Sunday.
According to the complaint available to “Stern”, Schön is said to have created a copy of the membership file of the entire state association between October 6, 2022 and October 18, 2022. In addition to names, the file also contained telephone numbers, dates of birth and addresses. “Creating such a complete file is of course completely unusual, as the Federal Office has confirmed,” the criminal complaint states.
The procedure is “conspicuous” because it does not fit with Schön’s “usage behavior in the period before”. There was also “no official reason” to create such a file at that time. The criminal complaint continues: “There is therefore a suspicion that Mr. Schön did not export the data to fulfill his employment contractual obligations, but rather in preparation for the project to found a competing party.”
Violation of data protection law?
But that would, among other things, be a violation of Section 42 of the Federal Data Protection Act. Anyone who illegally transmits or makes accessible “non-generally accessible personal data of a large number of people” to third parties and does so in a “commercial manner” can be punished with a fine or up to three years’ imprisonment.
Lukas Schön said when asked by “Stern”: “I can’t say anything about the allegations at the moment, I haven’t received anything about this matter yet.” When asked whether he had saved the file without authorization and, if so, with what intention, he replied: “Definitely no, so I had no goal.”
Berlin specialist lawyer for information technology law Jan Froehlich believes the criminal complaint is understandable. The documented processes would justify the assumption that “processing that is not permitted under data protection law” may exist. “The documents presented as well as the time of transmission and the reference to previously missing, comparable activities speak for this,” said Froehlich. However, the presumption of innocence still applies.