The home of Theodor Reppe, who owns the wikileaks.de domain, was raided by German police in retaliation for Wikileaks’ publication of the secret government blocklists from around the world, like the Australian list of forbidden sites. The “ACMA” list is supposed to be a list of child porn and other illegal sites, and it is the backbone of a proposal to censor the entire Australian Internet. Publication of the ACMA list showed that the bureaucrats charged with secretly building a list of forbidden material had shoved in enormous amounts of legitimate stuff that they just happened to disagree with — straight-ahead porn sites, gambling sites, and other material. Unsurprisingly, people who are given absolute power over their neighbors’ intellectual curiosity without any accountability end up misbehaving.
A statement on Wikileaks’s website claims police were investigating the “distribution of pornographic material” and “discovery of evidence”.
Wikileaks claims Mr Reppe is not involved in the website other than “sponsoring the German domain name and mirroring a collection of Wikileaks US Congressional Research Service reports”…
“The raid is over the censorship lists, but which particular list, we can not be certain, although the Australian lists are the most recent and the most prominent due to their non-voluntary status.”
In the past week, Wikileaks published three lists all purporting to be the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s (ACMA’s) blacklist of websites.
While ACMA and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy last week denied the list belonged to ACMA, they both warned that the Australian Federal Police (AFP) would investigate its distribution.
The lists contained apparent links to child pornography websites, gambling sites, as well as relatively innocuous sites including those of a dentist and canteen manager.
Police raid Wikileaks.de domain owner Theodor Reppe’s home over ‘censorship lists’
(Thanks, Tom!)