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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."
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?
The BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst ~ foreign new service) ie German CIA are still upset over its secret agents getting exposed in a black flag operation in Kosovo.
T-Systems (Deutsche Telekom) was exposed revealing over two dozen secret IP address ranges used by the BND.
The email of a top BND official might have also been listed.
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Bundesnachrichtendienst&fulltext=Search should give slashdot readers some idea as to why Germany is so active around wikileaks.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
Athy, athier, athiest.
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.
Silly rabbit
"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.
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...
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.
You mean I'll get bumped up to a higher priority? It's possible. But it's like being arrested for something. Before it happens, you're worried about getting caught for any little thing and possibly getting a record. But once that's actually happened to you and you've been through it, you're no longer afraid of being arrested for its own sake, afraid of being judged or labelled, but only because of estimated consequences which you weigh up for yourself. The emotional 'omg - I'll be accused of something' side of things is gone. This is particularly the case if you were hassled falsely or otherwise don't feel what you did was wrong. Going on a government watch list is the same - there might be different degrees of consequence but once the initial "we might add you to the list" threat is gone, it loses a lot of its power over you. I now accept that I'm probably on a list somewhere (not through actions, but through speaking my mind and membership of a few human rights organizations) and my behaviour has gone from a vague unease that something I might do could make me look suspicious to a feeling of what the Hell, they already said they don't trust me.
Have you seen these hysterical new posters for the UK police "anti-terrorism" campaign. It's hard to believe that those producing them think they'll have any actual anti-terrorism effect and that it isn't just a deliberate attempt to promote fear and distrust amongst people. Honestly - telling people to inspect their neighbour's rubbish for bomb-making materials? You could not make it up! When "lists" get too pervasive and warnings get so dumb,the concern about being labelled a suspect loses its power to control you because pretty much everyone you know and associate with is in the same boat. At this rate the only people not on the list will be the police themselves, at which point it becomes society vs. authority again and history takes its usual course.
I'm just waiting for the first "Terrorist Pride" march.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.