Anonymous Target Germany's Political Right

01/10/2012

 

Anonymous Under Fire

Criticism Mounts against Anti-Nazi Website

By Marcel Rosenbach

A group of online activists associated with the loose-knit hacker collective Anonymous has set its sights on Germany's far-right scene. But its method of publishing private information in its raw form, creating the potential for further abuse, has drawn criticism from both its supporters and targets.

The activist says that he and his associates were prompted to act by revelations in early November that a neo-Nazi terror group calling itself the National Socialist Underground (NSU) had apparently murdered at least 10 people in a seven-year killing spree. The activist is hard to get a hold of. For him, speaking on the phone is too risky, and emailing even more so. Instead, he prefers to communicate via encrypted online chats.

A little over a week ago, he and some friends launched a new Internet portal, nazi-leaks.net (German only), advertising it as "Operation Blitzkrieg." The site aims to publish hacked confidential data, much like Julian Assange's whistleblowing platform WikiLeaks. But, in this case, the platform is a place for amassing confidential information about the far-right scene in Germany.

RP - I couldn't access it using Google, I don't know if it's been taken down altogether...

During an online chat, the anonymous activist says that there is a team of "five to 10" individuals behind the platform, and that they have brought together several data sets, many of which have previously been published elsewhere. These have included the names of alleged donors to Germany's far-right National Democratic Party (NPD), internal NPD emails, a list of contacts from the right-wing weekly newspaper Junge Freiheit and customer data from neo-Nazi online stores. The activist adds that he and his associates decided "it would be appropriate to simply offer everything in one central place."

When asked who is behind this campaign and what the group aims to achieve, the activist simply types "We are Anonymous" before signing off.

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