German police raid home of Wikileaks domain holder

by Steve Ragan - Mar 25 2009, 16:00

According to a report posted to Wikileaks, on Monday just after 21:00 CET, police in Dresden and Jena searched the homes of Theodor Reppe, the owner of the wikileaks.de domain. The Wikileaks report also says police told Reppe that his ownership of the domain was the reasoning for the raid itself.

The documentation posted to Wikileaks says police raided the homes looking for evidence of “distribution of pornographic material” and “discovery of evidence”. The scope of the warrant, specifically the pornography distribution, caused Wikileaks to speculate that the police were searching for child pornography.

“It is therefore not totally clear why the search was made, however Wikileaks, in its role as a defender of press freedoms, 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,” the report said.

“The raid appears to be related to a recent German social hysteria around child pornography and the controversial battle for a national censorship system by the German family minister Ursula von der Leyen,” it added. “It comes just a few weeks after a member of parliament, SPD minister Joerg Tauss had his office and private house searched by police. German bloggers discussing the subject were similarly raided.”

Just last week Wikileaks embarrassed the Australian government by publishing the country's communications regulator's Internet blacklist. The sites listed by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) catalogue a range of activities deemed unsuitable by the authority, including those related to child pornography and criminal activities. Mysteriously, a number of seemingly legitimate sites made it on to the now notorious list, including a tourism site, a boarding kennel, and the site of a Queensland dentist.

Federal Minister for Communications Stephen Conroy said the list was false, commenting: “This is not the ACMA blacklist. The published list purports to be current at 6 August 2008 and apparently contains approximately 2400 URLs whereas the ACMA blacklist for the same date contained 1061 URLs.”

After that denial, there was no further comment.

Censorship online is a hot button topic. Politicians argue for it as a means for protection. The idea is that if sites are blocked then the public is safe from the information or content they contain. However, the obvious flaw to that logic is that the government really cannot dictate what content is available online to anyone. Adding to that is the fact that with the vast expanse that is the Internet, information and content will always find a way online.

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