German cops raid Wikileaks after Internet blacklist posted

[Eugen Leitl]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/03/german-cops-target-wikileaks.ars 

German cops raid Wikileaks after Internet blacklist posted

German police have raided the homes of a man associated with the
whistleblower site Wikileaks, as part of an investigation the site claims
stems from its recent publication of several countries' secret Internet
filtering blacklists.

By Julian Sanchez | Last updated March 25, 2009 7:08 PM CT

German police on Tuesday raided the homes of Theodor Reppe, owner of the
German domain for the controversial whistleblower site Wikileaks. According
to Wikileaks itself, police told Reppe he was targeted because of his links
to the site, and official documents indicate the search was meant to uncover
evidence of "distribution of pornographic material." Though Wikileaks itself
doesn't host porn, site administrators believe the impetus for the raids may
be their recent publication of a secret Australian blacklist of banned sites,
which includes the URLs of numerous sites that host child pornography.

Police in both Dresden and Jena appear to have coordinated in simultaneous
searches of Reppe's residence, and asked him to turn over passwords
associated with the Wikileaks.de domain, which they reportedly hoped to
disable. But Wikileaks says that Reppe, who also hosts a popular server for
the anonymous Tor routing network, is not actively involved with its
operations beyond holding the registration for the .de domain and mirroring
an archive of Congressional Research Service reports released by the site
earlier this year.

A more recent leak may have brought the site into police crosshairs: last
week the site posted what it claimed were lists of banned websites maintained
by the Australian Media and Communications Authority. As part of a
much-criticized content filtering scheme, currently in the testing stage, the
secret list is distributed to ISPs and the makers of filtering software.

Stephen Conroy, Australia's Minister for Broadband, Communications and the
Digital Economy, initially denied that the posted lists were accurate, noting
that the official ACMA blacklist contained only 1,061 sites at the date on
the leaked document, which included some 2,300 URLs. Colin Jacobs of the
civil liberties group Electronic Frontiers Australia suggested that the
discrepancy was likely the result of an individual vendor combining their own
blacklist with the government's, and Conroy later acknowledged that an
updated post was "close" to the official list. Many of the sites on the list
appear to host child pornography (we declined to click through to check), but
press reports have noted the inclusion of sites offering adult pornography,
online gambling, and even a few MySpace pages and ordinary businesses.

Wikileaks called the raids a symptom of "social hysteria around child
pornography" in Germany, and claimed that police breached protocol by failing
to inform Reppe of his rights and falsely asserting, on the official search
document, that Reppe had consented to have the search proceed without a
witness present. Neither Wikileaks.de nor any of the site's other domains
have been affected, though Wikileaks.org was down as a result of heavy
traffic much of Wednesday, and as of this writing, its front page appears to
have reverted to an earlier version.

This is scarcely the first time that the site has come under fire: attempts
to shut it down have come from diverse quarters, from Swiss bankers to the
Mormon and Scientologist churches. They've even been threatened with
prosecution by the head of Germany's foreign spy service.

Wikileaks is based in Sweden, where stringent journalistic shield laws bar
any effort to uncover the identity of a reporter's anonymous sourcebwhich may
come in handy given that Australian authorities have suggested they may
pursue legal action against the leaker if they can identify the responsible
party. A spokesperson for Wikileaks told Australian press that while one of
the blacklists posted on the site was definitely the impetus for the Geman
raids, it's unclear whether it had been spurred by any direct contact with
anyone in the Australian government.