[Infowarrior] - German intelligence scrubs European database after Wikileaks exposure

[Richard Forno]

WIKILEAKS PRESS RELEASE (English)
For Immediate Release

Sun Nov 16 04:14:36 2008 GMT

"German intelligence scrubs European records after Wikileaks exposure"

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/SF

WIKILEAKS--Between Friday night and Sunday morning, a massive deletion
operation took place at the European Internet address register (RIPE) to
scrub references to a cover used by Germany's premier spy agency, the
Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND.

The cleanup operation comes the night after Wikileaks' revealed of over
two dozen covert BND networks provided by T-Systems (Deutsche Telekom).
The addresses were assigned to an unregistered company at a Munich-based
PO box linked to T-Systems.

The telco purged the RIPE database of all networks exposed by Wikileaks,
moving the addresses into a several giant anonymous "Class B" address  
pools.

The move comes just a few hours after T-Systems Computer Emergency
Response Team (CERT) contacted Wikileaks to demand removal of an
internal T-Systems memo listing the BND cover addresses. Wikileaks
refused and T-System did not respond to requests for further detail by
the time of writing.

Yet an investigation into the addresses over the weekend reveals key
information about the BND's Internet activities. Findings include the
removal of information on the BND's own German Wikipedia entry--which
stated that the Goethe Institute was sometimes used as BND cover, visits
to websites including the Russian government and a Berlin escort agency
(perhaps for "honey traps"), as well as crawling the Internet for
terrorism related topics, such as the assassination of Iraqi insurgent
leader Abu Musab Zarqawi.

Website references reveal that in 2006 numerous hosters of Internet
websites complained about out of control "data mining" robots from two
of the BND-linked IP addresses. One of the hosters ran a popular
discussion forum on counter-terrorism operations.

The integrity and transparency of the RIPE system is not assisted
by the T-Systems deletion. German citizens may wonder at the double
standard. At a time when individual's Internet addresses are being
recorded by ISPs under data retention laws derisively referred to as
"Stasi 2.0", the "real Stasi" has had the largest telco in Germany scrub
its addresses from the European record within 24 hours of their  
exposure.

For further information and documents on the case please see:

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/German_Secret_Intelligence_Service_%28BND%29_T-Systems_network_assignments%2C_13_Nov_2008

and the according discussion page:

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Talk:German_Secret_Intelligence_Service_%28BND%29_T-Systems_network_assignments%2C_13_Nov_2008