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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."

4 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. 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...

  2. 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.

  3. 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?