It is depressing to read this WikiLeakS.org press release about the futile censorship of the WikiLeakS.DE domain name alias "cover name", which simply points to the WikiLeakS.org servers, which are not in Germany, but in Sweden.
April 9, 2009
Fri Apr 10 19:39:36 2009 GMT
WIKILEAKS PRESS RELEASE
On April 9th 2009, the internet domain registration for the investigative journalism site Wikileaks.de was suspended without notice by Germany's registration authority DENIC.
The action comes two weeks after the house of the German WikiLeaks domain sponsor, Theodor Reppe, was searched by German authorities. Police documentation shows that the March 24, 2009 raid was triggered by WikiLeaks' publication of Australia's proposed secret internet censorship list. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) told Australian journalists that they did not request the intervention of the German government.
The publication of the Australian list exposed the blacklisting of many harmless or political sites and changed the nature of the censorship debate in Australia. The Australian government's mandatory internet censorship proposal is now not expected to pass the Australian senate.
On March 25 the German cabinet finalized its own proposal to introduce a nation-wide internet censorship system. Australia and Germany are the only Western democracies publicly considering such a mandatory censorship scheme.
While last week German police claimed to the news magazine Der Spiegel that they had been ignorant about WikiLeaks' role as an international press organization, this "excuse" is surely no longer valid. Despite being questioned by the press, German authorities have still not contacted WikiLeaks or its publishers to resolve the issue, or indeed, at all. The lack of contact is inexcusable.
[...]
WikiLeaks continues publishing on its other (non-German) domains. If the German cabinet's censorship proposal passes the Bundestag, presumably those WikiLeaks domains would be added to Germany's secret blacklist.
Germany and China are now the only two countries currently censoring a WikiLeaks domain.
[...]
What are the German authorities playing at ? Even the Australians are denying that they requested such censorship.
Who exactly is the petty official who ordered this censorship ?
This censorship probably breaches the European Convention on Human Rights, Article 10, which is enacted into the domestic law if each European Union country, and in some other ones as well.
It probably also breaches the European Union European Council Electronic Commerce Directive, which, very sensibly, exempts telecommunications and internet infrastructure providers from civil or criminal liability for the sins of their customers.
The United Kingdom Human Rights Act 1998 Schedule 1 gives this wording:
Article 10 Freedom of expression
1 Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2 The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.
"formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law" should require an actual Court Order, where the lawyers for person who is being censored have a chance to cross examine and refute the allegations made against them, something which does not appear to have happened in this case.
It probably also breaches
which exempts internet service providers and telecommunications companies from civil and criminal liability for the content which they transfer unknowingly and without modification through their infrastructure either as "mere conduits" or through "caching"
The UK implementation of this, the wording of which has been inserted into later Act of Parliament:
Statutory Instrument 2002 No. 2013
The Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002
[...]
Caching18. Where an information society service is provided which consists of the transmission in a communication network of information provided by a recipient of the service, the service provider (if he otherwise would) shall not be liable for damages or for any other pecuniary remedy or for any criminal sanction as a result of that transmission where -
(a) the information is the subject of automatic, intermediate and temporary storage where that storage is for the sole purpose of making more efficient onward transmission of the information to other recipients of the service upon their request, and
(b) the service provider -
(i) does not modify the information;
(ii) complies with conditions on access to the information;
(iii) complies with any rules regarding the updating of the information, specified in a manner widely recognised and used by industry;
(iv) does not interfere with the lawful use of technology, widely recognised and used by industry, to obtain data on the use of the information; and
(v) acts expeditiously to remove or to disable access to the information he has stored upon obtaining actual knowledge of the fact that the information at the initial source of the transmission has been removed from the network, or access to it has been disabled, or that a court or an administrative authority has ordered such removal or disablement.
This legal exemption certainly applies to the top level German .DE domain name registry DENIC, and probably also to Theodor Reppe, the actual domain name registrant as well.
We would welcome any URL pointers to the equivalent German enactments of the Council of Europe European Convention on Human Rights and the European Union European
As the previous blog article speculated, this censorship of the WikiLeakS.DE domain name may have as much to do with the Wikileaks dispute with the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence service, as it does with the Australian censors:
See:
More detail on WikiLeaks.de suspension
WikiLeakS.DE seems to be back online, pointing to the Swedish IP address 88.80.13.160, via some new Domain Name Servers, through IKS GmbH in Jena, Germany, with secondary and tertiary DNS pointing to Cable and Wireless.
As of 13.08.2009, both the .de and .org domain consistently time out for me on a German T-online connection. I noticed while I was following a link in one of my articles. I have also tried using the IP I resolved through another DNS, but to no avail. The wikileaks.be mirror site in Belgium and .co.uk are apparently offline as well, and already being squatted.
I can only hope this is but a temporary outage, and not the final curtain. If we can't protect a site from censorship anymore, we have really lost.
@ Thomas Delbeke - have you tried free blog services like Blogger or Wordpress ?
Since you are not trying to be an anonymous whistleblower, why bother with WikiLeaks.org at all ?
You will not get any sympathy or publicity for your cause if you spam long, off topic comments into other people's blogs.