German Police Raid Homes of Wikileaks.de Domain Owner

BountyX writes "First and foremost, wikileaks.org is back up after downtime due to server load; however, the German government wants to keep the site down. According to their twitter page, police have raided the home of Wikileaks.de domain owner Theodor Reppe (PDF) over internet censorship lists that were leaked two weeks ago. What the Australian government's secret ACMA internet censorship blacklist has to do with Germany is a mystery. This case is a prime example of multiple governments collaborating in support of censorship." Reader iter8 provides a link to coverage on Wikileaks itself, which says that police searched Reppe's homes in both Dresden and Jena, and adds: "According to police, the reason for the search was 'distribution of pornographic material' and 'discovery of evidence.' Wikileaks has published censorship lists for Australia, Thailand, Denmark and other countries. Included on the lists are references to sites alleged to contain pornography, including child pornography. Wikileaks has not published any images from the sites."

Comments

lemme get this straight

[Swampash]

His house was raided by the cops because he was listed as the registrant for the domain wikileaks.de? Is that what passes for probable cause in the Fatherland?

WTF?

Re:lemme get this straight

[h4rm0ny]

Wow! I think I might actually start making donations to these people - If they're getting this much hassle and attitude of various governments and agencies, they must be doing something right.

Sure, I'll probably go on a government watch list, but the way things are going we either all already are or soon will be, so why should that be a discouragement?

Re:lemme get this straight

[knarf]

Ah, but there is a relatively easy solution to that: don't spread the list itself, instead spread a list of secure hashes (sha256 or something similar) of the blocked domains. If you want to check whether your domain is blocked you run it through a similar hashing algorithm. If the hashes match the domain is on the list (assuming that the hash size has been chosen well so that the chance of collisions is negligible). You could run this whole process in a convenient web page. Add several lists of hashes for known blocklists and you've got yourself an online blacklist checker which the authorities can not (legally) touch. Should it ever come to a court case the actual list(s) can be revealed and the hashes recalculated so as to prove that they are correct.

Re:lemme get this straight

[Curunir_wolf]

Until such time as the western governments stop being evil all the time, I think that's a perfectly reasonable position to take.

Yup evil things, like public education (even if it sucks, it's better then nothing), social security to help our elderly, roads so we can drive our cars, the Internet....all evil things.

Yep.

• public education = Indoctrination centers for your children that the government owns. Don't send them to their indoctrination and go to jail.
• social security = ponzi scheme designed to provide the government more money, enslave the population, encourage the beneficiaries to vote for more benefits, and which will inevitably bankrupt the entire system as more people go on the entitlement list and fewer are paying into the ponzi scheme pot. Maybe they'll just send old people those IOUs that the treasury has filled the SS "trust fund" with.
• Roads so we can drive cars, and spend money on gas to get to our isolated homes where no stores or businesses are within walking distance, and enrich the global oil conglomerates and the tyrannical dictators that control the oil supplies.
• The Internet, mostly built with private funds and the vast majority of which is privately owned, but which governments are quickly trying to get under control so they can censor the dissenting voices.

Yep, all those evil things.

Whack-a-mole

[Dracophile]

To us, it looks like a game of whack-a-mole. To the authorities, however, it may look like a hydra, and I worry that they might start acting like it. If they haven't already.

Smart Move

[Jane_Dozey]

Smart move, raiding the home of a person involved in a website devoted to leaking crappy behavior by companies and governments. Even smarter citing wishy-washy reasons for doing so. Real smart.

Obligatory Ghandi Quote...

[LaminatorX]

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

Keep up the good work, wikileaks. Somebody's got to.

Re:Unbelievable...

[msuarezalvarez]

No, they were not. The immense majority of currently living Germans were not even planned at the time of the Nazis. Guilt is not inherited, you know...

Wikileaks treads a fine line

[abigsmurf]

If this looks like the first case of international collaboration over a wikileaks takedown, it could be a sign of things to come.

Wikileaks relies on the fact that, although they piss countries off, they never piss of a lot of countries at once. As such a takedown in one country means little because of its distribution.

However what would happen if something really major got posted on Wikileaks, something that a government would need to go all out to remove. Say someone posted a list identifying all CIA agents. Would the US government make its allies act to take down wiki leaks presence in each of their country? Would they get ICANN involved and order them to wipe all of its urls off the web? Even block all wikileak IPs at a root server level?

The second a website like Wikileaks which tries to evade potential countermeasures becomes a nuisence to enough people, there'll be plans (if they don't already exist, it's hard to see intelligence agencies not having thought about it) drawn up about how you'd go about wiping a site from the internet. If this does happen, it'll have dire consequences about the future of the net.