14 DAY TRIAL // A group of hackers, members of the Anti-Fascist Action (ANTIFA), successfully broke into the forum of the Blood & Honor neo-Nazi network. They retrieved over 800 MB of information on members, discussions and meetings, and then uploaded the archives for download on public file sharing servers.
The Blood & Honor is a neo-Nazi organization that was founded in UK in the 1980s by Ian Stuart Donaldson, a punk rock musician, leader of the Skrewdriver band. Its purpose was to spread the neo-Nazi ideology through music and to organize “white power” concerts for Rock Against Communism (RAC) bands. The Blood & Honor network is illegal in Germany and has been banned since 2000. Its Spanish branch was also closed down in 2005 following many arrests.
The hackers identify themselves as a hacking group associated with ANTIFA, called Daten-Antifa (data-antifa). The Anti-Fascist Action (ANTIFA) is an extremist left-wing socialist group that opposes sexism, racism and homophobia. It has branches in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, the Czech Republic and other countries. An excerpt of their announcement reads: “As part of our struggle against the fascist movement we hacked the forum of [Blood & Honor forum link]”.
The database contains information on over 31,948 registered members of the Blood & Honor forum, and the hackers distributed a mirror of the full forum as a self-installing local web server so that anyone interested can analyze the data. Thousands of public discussions, concert locations and even private messages between members are disclosed.
The hackers claim this was a collaborative effort undertook by "domestic and abroad” groups, which acted in a "laboriously prepared cloak-and-dagger operation" that involved a “house search.” The data has been carefully analyzed by journalists for the German Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper and Bild tabloid. Frankfurter Rundschau reported that the database contained information on about 500 German members of the Blood & Honor, while Bild suggested a number of 1,200. They also noted that it contained evidence that the German members organized illegal concerts in the country and abroad.
Even though the authorities cannot use this information in trials because it was obtained illegally, it could still help them start some investigations, Katharina Koenig from the Action Alliance against the Right believes. Guenther Hoffmann from the Center for Democratic Culture commented for Frankfurter Rundschau that “some people in the far-right extremist scene are going to get very nervous, including activists from the NPD (Germany's far-right National Democratic Party).”