Wikileaks.de taken offline by German registrar

[nsane.forums]

Germany and Wikileaks are going at it again. The latest kerfuffle comes courtesy of German registration authority, DENIC, which has yanked the domain registration for wikileaks.de. The domain, which is still unavailable as of publication, is held by Theodor Reppe of Dresden, Germany, whose home was raided last month by German police. 

The raid came shortly after Wikileaks published a blacklist reportedly used by the Australian government to block banned websites. The list is closely guarded by the Australian Media and Communications Authority, and is reportedly distributed to ISPs and makers of filtering software as part of Australia's ambitious (and unrealistic) content filtering initiative.

Wikileaks has denied that Reppe has any involvement in the active operations of the site, saying that he is merely the one holding the registration. According to a statement posted by Wikileaks, the site's admins have yet to be officially contacted by representatives of the German government, a development the site calls "inexcusable."

Wikileaks has built up an impressive portfolio of leaked documents like those from secretive religious organizations, congressional reports, specs for military hardware capable of jamming IEDs used by insurgents in Iraq, and even its own donors list. In doing so, it has found few friends in governments and courts, with one judge even ordering its DNS record be erased after documents from Swiss Bank Julius Baer were uploaded to the site.

As the saying goes, information wants to be free. As a result, attempts by a single government to hinder access to documents hosted by sites such as Wikileaks prove to be largely ineffective. Case in point: even though wikileaks.de is still out of order, wikileaks.org—with the same content—is still open for business.

DEINC tells heise.de that it was notified that Reppe was no longer managing the domain, and that its contract was terminated on March 31.

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