Thursday, June 23, 2011

Hunting Nazi Gold with Google Maps


German hacking group No Name Crew earlier this month managed to hack the website of the far-right German political party the NPD. Someone has used the data to create a Google Map that lists the full names and addresses of 400 donors to the NPD.

The map contains a legend that says that it "might contain some errors..", which obviously does raise concerns that someone completely unrelated to the NPD could end up being targeted by a user of the map. I've therefore decided to not link directly to the map itself.

In 1998 the BNP, a far right group in the UK, similarly had its members' list hacked. A UK map developer also created a Google Map of the political party's members.



The map developer quickly took the map down, after realising that innocent people might end up being attacked. Instead he created a heat map of the UK, that didn't show individual addresses, but instead gave an overview of where in the country support for the BNP was stronger.

A similar approach from the German hackers or the creator of the NPD map would provide an interesting map of where support for the NPD is concentrated, without causing any risk to people's safety.

Via: taz.de

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You once wrote SPD where you clearly meant NPD.

Keir Clarke said...

Thanks - now corrected!