German Wikileaks Domain Suspended Without Warning

mb writes to mention that Germany has gone one step further in impeding access to Wikileaks. Germany's registration authority, DENIC, recently suspended Wikileaks.de without notice. "The action comes two weeks after the house of the German WikiLeaks domain sponsor, Theodor Reppe, was searched by German authorities. Police documentation shows that the March 24, 2009 raid was triggered by WikiLeaks' publication of Australia's proposed secret internet censorship list. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) told Australian journalists that they did not request the intervention of the German government."

Comments

Re:No sympathy for trust breakers

[unlametheweak]

A lot of what he said is illogical and untrue. Wikileaks does fact check, and in fact if what they posted wasn't true then it wouldn't be so controversial, and governments around the world wouldn't be attempting to shut them down. And no they don't post juvenile and second rate stories; a lot of what they publish is of important political and human interest.

Well it seems I've unintentionally replied to the GP in a round-about way.

Re:Is this really censorship?

[Yetiszaf]

This is not about "improperly" suspending a domain name.

wikileaks posted the australian block-lists which contain links to child-pornography.

Linking or forwarding to such links is illegal in germany.

I think it may have been better to strip links which contained pedophilia or similar things from those lists before publishing them.

WAIT A MINUTE!

[AlgorithMan]

The law which would allow them to suspend a domain for anything is not yet through our assembly - IF they did this, it's illegal - also the message from the Domain name registrar (DENIC) translates out to

The requested domain is currently not reachable

The domain-owner or the administrative contact should be informed about these problems by now. We expect them to be solved soon.

If you as domain-owner or administrative contact are not yet informed about the hassle, we might not have reached you. In this case, please contact: ...

so this MIGHT be a technical problem, though this still highly alarms me, since I am a political activist in germany, myself...

Re:Is this really censorship?

[rm999]

Wikileaks.org is the main domain name and has not been shut down. No access to information has been lost, except to the tiny minority of people who were only using wikileaks.de and don't know how to use a search engine.

It's a very minor form of censorship, but I think this story is a red herring to more important censorship stories like this one
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks#Potential_future_Australian_censorship

Solution (Probably Not Needed)

[no1home]

While there is no real loss of access to the information or loss of information itself, the loss of the wikileak.de domain is bad for those who prefer to use it. As has been argued elsewhere in these comments, this is censorship and it is wrong (even if it was accidental or some misunderstanding).

How do we prevent this or restore this? The wikileak system should be more distrubuted. OK, it probably already is pretty distributed, especially when you account for the language- or country-specific domains. However, maybe we can do more? WikiTaxi (http://www.wikitaxi.org/delphi/doku.php/products/wikitaxi/index) is something I just learned about today and it looks quite interesting. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to bring down a P2P version of a wikileak website? I don't know the technical details of how to set it up, but there are a lot of incredibly smart programmers out there who can make it happen.