Justice scandal: how highly sensitive data ended up in the Zurich milieu
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The prosecuting authorities seized tens of hard drives belonging to the Zurich judiciary from Roland Gisler, who had previously been convicted.
It’s a law enforcement officer’s nightmare. Confidential, highly sensitive information about him, about victims of crime or those he is investigating is leaked. In the worst case, it falls into the hands of dubious characters who – if the nightmare ends badly – then try to blackmail him with this information.
For the Zurich prosecutors and police officers, the nightmare has become reality. And their own authority is to blame for the data meltdown: the Zurich Department of Justice.
Psychiatric reports and home addresses
For years, the directorate has released old servers and computers for disposal, some of which had unencrypted data on their hard drives. Including directories with cell phone numbers of canton police officers, home addresses of probably, building plans, even psychiatric reports from the accused. This emerges from documents that are available. This data reached Roland Gisler (58), a man from the Zurich milieu with multiple criminal records. He owns the Bar Neugasshof, which has been the focus of the police for centuries.
The Zurich authorities have known about the self-inflicted data scandal for two years. They have so far kept it secret from the public. As Blick research shows, an administrative investigation was initiated in 2020 and has since been completed. The Directorate of Justice has not provided any information about its implementation or its outcome – and the authority refuses to publish the final report, despite the Disclosure Act. According to Blick information, even the Cantonal Council’s Audit Committee (GPK) has not yet received it.
Fehr downplays scandal
The responsible government councilor Jacqueline Fehr (59, SP) downplays the matter to the GPK of the Zurich cantonal council.
The alarm bells rang in the commission after milieu lawyer and SVP cantonal councilor Valentin Landmann (72) together with other SVP members submitted a question about the scandal in the cantonal parliament on Monday. Landmann knows about the matter because he himself is involved in the case. He is Gisler’s lawyer.
Gisler got hold of the hard drives and USB sticks of the Directorate of Justice through his brother André Gisler (57). This war worked for the directorate from about 2000 to 2014. During this period, the Head of the Justice Department was SP party colleague Markus Notter (62) and later Green Party Councilor Martin Graf (68). According to an IT manager, the hard drives were “always properly disposed of or destroyed,” as he asserted in an internal memo.
Hard drives store in wooden box in the garden
Statements by André Gisler and a former event give rise to strong doubts.
The deal, as described by André Gisler during the interrogation of the public prosecutor’s office: He picked up the decommissioned computers, printers, servers and other devices from the Justice Department and was allowed to resell them in return after deleting the data on them. As he says, there was neither an employment contract, let alone ever having to confirm in writing that the data had been properly deleted. There is talk of thousands of computers that came into the man’s possession.
Some of the hard drives and sticks are given to his brother Roland Gisler. They are stored behind his house in a large wooden box. When looking through the hard drives, he found dozens of unencrypted documents, he says. These allegedly include interrogations and reports written by the well-known forensic psychiatrist Frank Urbaniok (60). When asked, he said that if that were true, he was never informed.
The leak only surfaced two years ago
The Zurich judiciary only got wind of where their data ended up two years ago. As can be seen from the interrogation protocols, André Gisler’s former employee is said to have contacted the authorities in 2013, specifically to the office of the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (EDÖB). He is said to have sent him several unencrypted military justice documents. But after that, according to him, nothing happened. He never got a reply to his email, he said.
Only when a woman suddenly appeared at the private address of a public prosecutor (see box) at the beginning of November 2020 did the judiciary initiate investigations. Just under a week later, Roland Gisler was arrested. He remained in custody for eight months. Criminal proceedings are pending against him for violence and threats against authorities and officials, as confirmed by the Zurich public prosecutor.
Prosecutor harassed on his own doorstep
The Zurich Directorate of Justice downplays the explosiveness of the data leak in its own authority – with reference to how long ago it all happened. But the fact is: she only found out about it two years ago. How emerges from an email from public prosecutor Beat D.* from the road traffic department to the then senior public prosecutor Beat Oppliger.
Accordingly, on November 8, 2020, shortly before 8 p.m., the doorbell rang at D.’s door. A woman with three children was standing in front of his front door. They asked him to put in a good word to their son’s employer, who was the subject of criminal proceedings at the time.
“Then there is a bigger problem”
D. was at a loss. “My phone number and my car license plates are blocked. It shouldn’t be possible to find out my home address just like that,” he wrote to the chief prosecutor.
The investigator found out that the woman had received the address from Roland Gisler. D. spoke to him – and was alarmed. “If the story of how Roland Gisler got my address is true, there is a bigger problem.”
In the subsequent questioning of witnesses, D. says he was “completely shocked”. It was clear to him that someone had not just gained unauthorized access to his computer. His home address is not stored anywhere. “It became clear to me that the whole thing must have a larger dimension.” A premonition that was soon to be confirmed.
* Name known to editors
The Zurich Directorate of Justice downplays the explosiveness of the data leak in its own authority – with reference to how long ago it all happened. But the fact is: she only found out about it two years ago. How emerges from an email from public prosecutor Beat D.* from the road traffic department to the then senior public prosecutor Beat Oppliger.
Accordingly, on November 8, 2020, shortly before 8 p.m., the doorbell rang at D.’s door. A woman with three children was standing in front of his front door. They asked him to put in a good word to their son’s employer, who was the subject of criminal proceedings at the time.
“Then there is a bigger problem”
D. was at a loss. “My phone number and my car license plates are blocked. It shouldn’t be possible to find out my home address just like that,” he wrote to the chief prosecutor.
The investigator found out that the woman had received the address from Roland Gisler. D. spoke to him – and was alarmed. “If the story of how Roland Gisler got my address is true, there is a bigger problem.”
In the subsequent questioning of witnesses, D. says he was “completely shocked”. It was clear to him that someone had not just gained unauthorized access to his computer. His home address is not stored anywhere. “It became clear to me that the whole thing must have a larger dimension.” A premonition that was soon to be confirmed.
* Name known to editors
Gisler is accused, among other things, of trying to blackmail and influence the Zurich judiciary with the data. The Milieu-Beizer was recently sentenced to several years in prison for, among other things, drug trafficking and illegal possession of weapons. He took the judgment to the Federal Supreme Court because he saw it as revenge by the Zurich authorities over the data scandal.
risk of blackmail attempt
The affair shows the risk of data leakage. Further blackmail attempts are not excluded. Finally, it is unclear who now has hard drives that still contain unencrypted data from the Zurich judiciary. According to the files, Gisler passed on documents to several people.
After a first inspection of the confiscated hard drives, the public prosecutor responsible was already certain that Roland Gisler was a person outside the authority who had “sensitive data from the judiciary”. He wrote that in February 2021 in a letter to the Supreme Court.
long known? Are you kidding me? Are you serious when you say that!
Today, the authorities are doing everything they can to put the scandal into perspective. The spokesman for the Directorate of Justice brushed off a first look request with the claim that this case was “known for a long time”. That’s not true. Then the matter was presented as cold coffee. Since 2013, data carriers have been disposed of “professionally certified”. This process was installed “regardless of the 2008 incident,” says media spokesman Benjamin Tommer. He – like government councilor Fehr to the GPK – claims that 2008 was the end of the data leak. But Blick as well as SVP cantonal councilor Landmann have documents that are dated from 2001 to 2012.
The public prosecutor’s office now also reports that there was only “a small amount of data from the judiciary” on the data carriers secured in connection with the criminal proceedings against Gisler. That might be a gross understatement. Blick had access to more than 30 documents, more than ten allegedly contain sensitive, sometimes very sensitive data.
Justice department leaves questions unanswered
Blick wanted to know from the management how it was possible for confidential documents to end up in the Zurich milieu. Was there actually no written agreement with the company that was entrusted with devices with highly sensitive data on them? How many hard drives containing potentially sensitive information are believed to still be in circulation? And what were the consequences of the administrative investigation that was commissioned to do so?
All of that remains open. The questions are “without exception the subject of the criminal investigation”, the judiciary only reports on request. The answers do not know the man and therefore cannot answer the questions.