Theodor Reppe

Theodor Reppe (born August 27, 1986 in Dresden ), works as an IT consultant and system administrator. He became known as the owner of the German domain for WikiLeaks , www.wikileaks.de , and as a member of the Pirate Party Germany . He operates u. a. a proxy server for anonymization on the Internet .

Establishment of the German domain for WikiLeaks

This is a domain such as wikileaks.org, which is supposed to guarantee the availability of WikiLeaks even in the event that individual Internet providers or countries have the primary domain blocked or closed. Theodor Reppe registered the domain in 2006 when he found out about WikiLeaks being founded to support the project. The benefits for WikiLeaks became apparent in 2010 when the original main page was exposed to attacks by distributed denial-of-service attacks, evaded servers of Amazon Web Services and was blocked there.

House searches

On March 24, 2009, police raided Theodor Reppe's apartment on charges of disseminating pornographic material , confiscating a PC and hard drive. WikiLeaks had previously published a list of Internet addresses censored in Australia , which also included those on sites with child pornography . Reppe did not declare himself responsible for the content distributed by WikiLeaks, but declared that he wanted to support WikiLeaks in general by registering the domain. As a result, the Pirate Party criticized legal deficiencies in the search and the ignorance of the police officers with regard to the context of keeping information on the Internet. Its chairman at the time, Dirk Hillbrecht , accused the authorities of “technical incompetence” and “actionism”.

Twenty months earlier, PCs and data carriers had been confiscated on charges of spreading child pornography from Reppe. Reppe maintained a Tor server to anonymize connection data on the Internet. The material from this seizure was returned without consequences.

In March 2011, Reppe was acquitted in both cases by the Dresden District Court - a decision that became final in January 2012.

Attitude to WikiLeaks

In January 2011, Reppe expressed solidarity with Julian Assange in an interview , but criticized that WikiLeaks had better focus on content rather than people. He no longer has any contact with Daniel Domscheit-Berg and does not work on his OpenLeaks project , but expects further disclosure platforms to emerge . He feared no professional or other consequences from his activity, although the criminal proceedings against him were still ongoing.