Secret neo-Nazi documents published

Everything but Nick Griffin's letter to Santa is about to hit the net

11 membership lists about to go online

Wikileaks is in the process of making a cache of documents and files from eleven different neo-Nazi organisations readable, and readily available, online. The membership records and private messages are currently being formatted to make them easy for non-techies to read and will be released on the Wikileaks site shortly.

The organisation got massive publicity last year when it published a BNP membership list handed over by a disgruntled ex-member.

The raw data is already available but needs formatting so: "your grandmother can read them and google can find them... Journalists won't write about it otherwise." The site is asking for volunteers with enough database skills to be able to expand fields and dumping to text. The compressed data is about 54MB.

The internal documents include more than just membership lists. There are what seem to be private internal messages, forum posts and email addresses. Groups who have lost data, or had it stolen, include Aryan Nations, Blood and Honour, White Revolution, Volks Front and the Hammerskin Nation.

The data should be available online from the usual sources shortly.

The Register

BNP leader ‘paid for UKIP member list’

Nick Griffin is to be investigated by the privacy watchdog after the BNP leader was accused of paying for a database containing the names and addresses of thousands of members of a rival party.

The database, which belonged to the UK Independence party and contained the details of about 3,500 of its members from London and the southeast, was passed to the British National party by a disaffected member in return for about £500, sources say. The BNP then canvassed many of the people on the UKIP list asking for funds to help fight its campaign in the run-up to June’s European elections. The BNP went on to claim two seats, including one for Griffin.

Last night the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which oversees data protection, said it would investigate. Under the terms of the Data Protection Act, anyone who sells data without authorisation from the designated “data controller” is guilty of an offence, as is the person who obtains it. If prosecuted and found guilty, transgressors are liable to a fine of up to £5,000. The Ministry of Justice is consulting about whether to impose custodial sentences for future breaches.

Griffin said yesterday that he had never personally paid for a UKIP membership list, although he conceded that some UKIP details had been passed to his party by former members. He added: “To the best of my knowledge, no one in the party has paid for such a list. Some UKIP members do join us and provide names and addresses of people who might be interested to hear from us. We have never had an entire UKIP membership list.”

Last week Griffin said the anonymous leaking on a website of his own party’s membership — the second time it has happened in the past 12 months — was part of a “concerted anti-BNP campaign”.

One of the names on the leaked UKIP database was Gerard Batten, an MEP for the party, who has previously complained to the ICO about the apparent data breach. Last night he said he was preparing a fresh complaint based on The Sunday Times’s evidence that the database had been bought and sold.

“We have long suspected the BNP had a [UKIP] membership list. Our members don’t want this stuff. The BNP do this based on the false belief they can take away some of our members,” he said.

Batten and others received unsolicited requests for donations from the BNP from 2008 until earlier this year. One sent in January appealed for funds for the BNP’s European election battle. It said: “If we can win one seat, the floodgates will open. One seat, just one, would put us on the world stage and would lead to an avalanche of popular support throughout this country.”

Last year Batten wrote to the ICO: “I suspect that my address and those of our UKIP London members were illegally accessed from a UKIP database.”

Now other sources, including from within the BNP, have confirmed that the database was obtained and exploited by the party. “Nick Griffin bought the database for surprisingly little, just a few hundred pounds,” said a source.

It is understood that the privacy watchdog wrote to the BNP warning it not to send Batten any more communications. But the source said the watchdog did not know the party also had the names and addresses of 3,500 other UKIP members.

An ICO spokesman said: “We are very concerned to hear that some UKIP members’ personal details have apparently been traded with the BNP. We will investigate this incident to establish the full facts. Buying or selling personal data is against the law, unless there is a public interest defence.”

Gerry Gable, publisher of the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, said: “The BNP jump up and down when their own membership lists are leaked, but it now emerges they are procuring the details of members of another party in an underhand way.”

Sunday Times

Entire BNP membership list goes online

Before reading this, you should appreciate that there are very strict limitations on what we are allowed to print and we intend to stay strictly within the law in the comments that we allow.

Having said all that, this breach of data security is startlingly bad for the BNP, not simply for the fact that the party has lost data - almost everyone seems to have managed to do that recently - but for the nature of that information.

Not only does the data, now available online, include the entire membership list with full names (and former names where there have been changes for any reason), addresses, contact numbers and email addresses, but also in many cases the member's age, particularly where those members are under eighteen. Yes, that's right. This list includes members as young as fourteen, male and female. Where a family membership is bought and paid for, the whole family is listed.

As if this isn't bad enough, the notes that are attached to many of the entries leave a lot of the members open to difficulties in their jobs, some of them being in the armed forces or the police and the BNP too - an illegal combination, and where not illegal, frequently frowned upon. Other members are noted as construction managers, receptionists, district nurses, lay preachers, police officers, company directors and teachers among many others.

Like this wasn't enough, the BNP has also listed hobbies or interests where for some reason they are deemed relevant. Thus we have short-wave radio hams, amateur historians, pagans, line-dancers and even a witch (male).

The contributors to nazi sites, many of whom are also members of the BNP, are suddenly in a frenzy, expecting to be outed at any moment. Here's just one comment from the North-West Nationalist blog:

'I've just had a call, I'm on it to. I want my fucking member money back, like has been mentioned here, I could lose my fucking job. I'm bloody angry.'

Not surprising really. I'd be pretty pissed off too.

Curiously, there are quite a number of BNP members abroad, presumably ex-pats or those working abroad temporarily - Australia, the USA, United Arab Emirates, Sao Paulo, Spain and the Netherlands were some that I noticed. Isn't the BNP opposed to foreign workers? I'm sure it was last time I looked.

One final thing (for the moment, because I'm sure this one will run and run): the list appears to include the December rebels. At first, I took this to mean that the membership list was a year out of date but after a good look through, it's become clear that by keeping a running list (as opposed to a clean list each membership year) the party is able to claim a much larger membership than it in fact has. Some of the additions to the list are as recent as September of this year, indicating that some of the members listed - though how many is anyone's guess - are not in fact members at all.

The implication is pretty clear (to me, at least) - BNP members are being defrauded when they have been told that the membership is growing exponentially. Take off all the dead members, those who have resigned (many still listed along with their reasons for leaving) and the most recent batch of rebels and the size drops considerably.

It's been suggested that the party's former treasurer John Walker is responsible for posting the list up publicly. We wouldn't know but by doing so, the poster has stuck a stick of dynamite under Griffin's rear end. The consequences and (especially) the repercussions may be interesting to watch.

Just as a complete aside, I should point out that we do not have a copy of this list, nor do we want one. The information we had was obtained online and appears suddenly to have been removed, at least for the moment...