Internet censorship: Wikileaks domain owner raided

I found this blog entry from another site interesting and
foreboding. The story starts in Australia, where some child porn sites are censored by the government by issuing a secret list of banned sites to ISP's. Wikileaks (based in Sweden) published the list, angering some officials. German police then raided the home of the Wikileaks domain owner.

http://sydwalker.info/blog/2009/03/25/wikileaks-the-jackboots-roll/

Wikileaks: the Jackboots roll

By Syd Walker on Wednesday, March 25th 2009

Last week was most eventful for Wikileaks, the international anti-censorship website.
Springtime in Germany

Springtime in Germany

It published a list that purported to be Australia’s ‘blacklist’ of sites as prepared by ACMA - twice. Wikileaks also lobbed a legal threat at Australian Communications Minister Senator Conroy, all the way from Sweden where Wikileaks is based. Throughout this period, the Wikileaks.org website suffered a remarkable amount of downtime.

Wikileaks legal grenade was in retaliation against Senator Conroy’s threat to ‘hunt down’ the list leaker - a threat which seemed to contradict Conroy’s insistence that the lists weren’t genuine. As the week progressed, the Minister fulminated, blustered, banned and threatened. What a performance! No wonder he never seems to get any real work done (such as the long-promised rollout of new high-speed communications infrastructure).

Today Wikileaks reports that police in Germany raided the Dresden and Jena houses of Theodor Reppe, who holds the domain registration for ‘wikileaks.de’. News Corp has just picked up the story.

As I pointed out in an earlier article, the German regime may have a keen interest in Australia’s experiment with foisting Internet censorship on an unwilling populace; it recently announced similar plans itself.

Should we score this round to Senator Conroy? It’s not clear. He may well deny that he had anything to do with the raid of an individual whom, it appears, has no operational involvement in the Wikileaks project.

I hope he denies it. The alternative is that Senator Conroy and his minions stoop so low as to summon cops in Germany to harass Australia’s anti-censorship activists and our overseas supporters.

Power, it is said, corrupts. Are the Ruddites now vying for Absolute Power - in yet another curious case of life imitating art?