From WikiLeaks

April 14, 2009

WIKILEAKS PRESS RELEASE (Deutsche Fassung: Mehr Details zur Wikileaks.de Stilllegung)

Tue Apr 14 07:05:51 2009 CEST

Registrar at fault; dispute related to last year's exposure of Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND.

BND chief Ernst Uhrlau

On April the 9th of 2009, the WikiLeaks.de domain ceased to be available after effective control was transferred from its registered owner, Theodore Reppe, to the Germany's internet authority, DeNIC. Details were initially hard to come by due to the Easter holiday period in Germany.

The transfer came two weeks after the March 24 search of Mr. Reppe's house by German police over WikiLeaks' publication of the internet censorship lists for Australia. At that time police demanded Mr. Reppe disable the WikiLeaks.de domain name (the request was denied).

Yet to understand the issue, we need to go back to an incident between a more secretive German authority and WikiLeaks late last year.

In November and December 2008, WikiLeaks released sensitive information on the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence service. This included documents and articles about corruption in Kosovo and a list of covert Internet addresses used by the BND under the cover bvoe.de. WikiLeaks had also earlier released documents about the BND's infiltration of Germany's Focus magazine.

The head of the BND, Ernst Uhrlau, eventually threatened WikiLeaks with criminal prosecution unless it removed BND documents (no documents were removed).

The WikiLeaks revelations of the bvoe.de cover operation were debated on the Internet, including in a discussion in the Heise.de forum.

The Heise discussion addresses the non-compliant information in the BND's domain registration for BND.de. That registration was accused of violating DeNIC registration standards, by, for instance, failing to include its physical address. As alleged in the posting, according to these standards, the intelligence agency did not have formal ownership over the BND.de domain, since it had not met the required standards for ownership.

In order to test this disparity in requirements for the BND, the WikiLeaks.de domain donor, Theodore Reppe, requested that the BND.de domain ownership be transferred to his account at the DeNIC licensed registrar Beasts Associated (based in Hamburg), through which the WikiLeaks.de domain was also registered.

As expected, the request was denied,

Original (German) "Sehr geehrter Herr Reppe, Sie haben die Domain bnd.de per Transfer angefordert. Es handelt sich hierbei - unschwer zu erkennen - um die Domain des Bundesnachrichtendienstes. Da es sich hierbei um eine bedeutende Domain handelt, bitten wir Sie umgehend das entsprechende Transfer-Fax und OwnerChange-Formular an uns zu senden. Bis zu Klärung dieses Vorfalls haben wir Ihren Account gesperrt. Mit freundlichen Grüßen Daniel Teixeira"