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List of Polish Spies Leaked On The Internet

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the here-have-some-szarlotka dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A list of 240,000 names of Polish secret agents, informers, secret service employees, and victims of persecution was leaked on the internet in the last days and became an instant hit. The search for "lista Wildsteina" (Wildstein's list) sky-rocketed to 300,000 per day in the second most popular search engine in Poland (onet.pl) outperforming "sex" (former top query) by more than 30 times. The list appeared on many web sites, p2p networks, and was made into a searchable database. There are worries the list might contain names of active security agents, still working abroad. Google news has more coverage."

6 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. Text of An Article by Omkar · · Score: 4, Informative

    A leaked list containing the names of some 240,000 people who allegedly spied for Poland's former communist regime has overtaken sex as the hottest search item on the Internet in Poland, press reports has said. "This thing is huge. We have recorded around 100,000 Internet searches a day for the list, which is 10 times the number looking for sex," Piotr Tchorzewski, who works at Poland's biggest Internet portal Onet, told Rzeczpospolita daily. The list, which contains in alphabetical order the names of alleged agents and collaborators of the communist-ero secret service, mixed together with the names of those who were allegedly spied on, has also been put up for auction on the Internet, but its bid price late yesterday -- 2.99 zlotys (around 75 euro cents) -- was hardly breaking records. On Onet's web portal, it tops the list of search items, and visitors are referred to 650,000 links for the controversial collection of names that has pushed the attorney general to launch legal proceedings and Prime Minister Marek Belka to express concern for the safety of active intelligence agents whose names "might" be on the list. The list, dubbed the Wildstein List after Bronislaw Wildstein, the journalist who secretly copied it around two weeks ago at the national archives, can change from one Internet consultation to the next, as hackers have been adding or taking off names, press reports said. From The Hindustan Times

  2. Not a list of spies by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is not a list of spies but a list of people who were on the records of former communist Polish spies, which includes spies, would-be-spies, people who refused to be spies and victims of spies. Saying that it is a list of spies is harmful for most of the people from that list. Please don't spread outright lies.

    1. Re:Not a list of spies by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      The better word would be "informers" or "snitches". The point is about people who would snitch on their coworkers or neigbours.

      The problem is, the list does not have any real info what the particular person was doing. They infer record type from file id accompanying the name, but it seems not exact. Then when you find someone you know there, you don't know is he was reporting on you, been spied on, employed in ministry of internal affairs or maybe just "checked out".

      According to one version I was secret police officer. They must have wiped my memory as I can't remember working for them...

  3. RTFAs!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Wonder who leaked this? I doubt it was the guy, nobody would want to get on the bad side of former-communist spy agencies.

    God! This is the most stupid comment I've ever read! No one "leaked" it, because it was a PUBLIC LIST anyone could read in the libraries of Polish Institute of National Remembrance! No one bothered to actually go there and read those names until Bronislaw Wildstein, a journalist which just an ordinary access to those files as any citizen, copied the files and gave them to few fellow journalists, who gave it to others and made a big fuzz about it calling it a "list of spies" which it isn't and which Wildstein never misrepresented as such. Please get some clue before you post another misinformation. Thank you. What is a much more important issue here is the fact that Wildstein has lost his job in a supposedly independent newspaper Rzeczpospolita because of giving others public documents which were not even classified. This is a serious question about the freedom of speech in Poland. The fuzz about "spies" is just bullshit. What is important here is that most of independent journalists think that Wildstein shouldn't have taken that list and given it to others and that any "responsible journalist" would never do it. We are talking about a publicly available not classified data here! This is important, not your Orwellian phobias about being "on the bad side of former-communist spy agencies." Take off your tinfoil hat and think about free speech for a while. And actually read something about this list.

    1. Re:RTFAs!!! by RWerp · · Score: 4, Informative

      Wildstein had the right to read the list and use the info in his journalist research, not to carry it from the IPN's library. Those are two different things. There is also the issue of privacy protection -- he distributed the names of 240,000 people, most of them who are not public figures. This pictures him as an irresponsible man.

      Wildstein publicly said that he doesn't care if his actions harm our currently working intelligence agencies. It's equivalent to an American saying "I don't care if I put CIA/FBI agent's lives in danger". Wildstein is a fanatic, who puts grand ideas above individual people. In this aspect, he's as communist as you could possibly be.

      --
      "Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
  4. Re:Similar by gihan_ripper · · Score: 5, Informative

    The name of the Slovenian emigre in question is Dusan Lajovic, and the database of Slovenian 'spies' can be found here.

    --
    Phoenix, Boston, Little Rock, see a pattern?