Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2008/11/20/wikileaks_bnp_hits/

BNP list hunters bring down Wikileaks

70 hits a second

By John Oates

Posted in Legal, 20th November 2008 13:33 GMT

The Wikileaks website struggled to stay online yesterday because of thousands of people looking for the leaked BNP membership list.

As revealed by the Register the list of more than 10,000 BNP members was leaked early on Monday morning and although it was removed from the original blog it quickly appeared elsewhere on the net. Police are investigating how the list got out, though BNP leader Nick Griffin is blaming ex-staff at the party.

Wikileaks specialises in hosting controversial documents and is spread across enough legal jurisdictions to make it all but impossible to serve with take-down notices.

A spokesman for Wikileaks told us: "We don't keep logs, for obvious reasons, but we were receiving approximately 70 requests per second to "wikileaks.org" for most of the day, most of which were related to the BNP story, so somewhere between two and six million for the 24 hour period.

"The story had particular interest in Germany also - nearly every paper there ran the story. And the German wikipedia now has an article on BNP. See our front page for a new map on the data."

The fallout from the publishing of the list continues - Merseyside Police are investigating allegations that a serving officer is a member. Rod Lucas, a TalkSport DJ, was also on the list - he insists he joined while researching a story.

The Association of Chief Police Officer rules say: “Membership or promotion of the British National Party by any member of the Police Service, whether police officer or police staff, is prohibited."®