Slashdot Mirror
List of Polish Spies Leaked On The Internet
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."
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
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.
240,000 secret agents?!
If everybody is a secret agent, it doesn't seem that 'secret' anymore...
Polish Spies: Quick! Turn off the internet! Seriously, though, this must be a horrible predicament to be in for anyone who was once a Polish spy.
"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." -Archimedes
The Department of Homeland Security should definitely do something about this Internet thingy.
Who wouldn't want to have sex with a spy?
You could play some James Bond theme song in the background for added effect, and even wear an eyepatch.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Hackers are so good with computers, did you read what they can do these days (from an article on google news)
"hackers have been adding or taking off names"
that is amazing they have figured out how to compromise the security of a text document and add or delete names from it
At long last I will track down, hunt, and kill my arch nemesis, Polish Sausage!
This is either 1. ironic 2. a Polish strategy for making the list inaccesible
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
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.
I don't know about you, but I'm going to do my darndest to help make sure this oversight is rectified.
Why post about it on slashdot then? It will make it even more popular.
Oh snap, after all they are only polish, nobody cares about what happens to them.[/sarcasm]
pwned.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
I can just imagine how it would sound in a movie: My name is Wolschansky, Vojzeh Wolschansky.
I believe they did it.
240,000 polish spies? I never imagined the cleaning products industry was so secretive,
"There are worries the list might contain names of active security agents, still working abroad."
"There are worries..."?
There's an understatement.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." ~The Honorable Daniel Patrick Moynihan
...oh wait, nevermind.
My other first post is car post.
or "Jackson."
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.
"If you pick at the scab of history, the blood will flow in the streets. Could there be more appropriate words for this event? I think not.
Years after the fall of communism, it seems some still bear enough of a grudge at the discredited regime that they will painstakingly assemble and disseminate a long list of names of individuals involved in espionage-related events. That the list was so quickly spread around the net and even turned into a database, together with its phenomenal popularity among internet users, indicated that many in Poland still have axes and possibly even scythes to grind over wrongs perpretrated during the Communist era.
Doubtless, reputations will be besmirched and careers ruined, some no doubt unjustly. And to what end? The ills of communism were many, but they are in the past. This obssessive assembling of databases serves only to dig up moldering corpses just to piss on their shoes.
People need to look ahead. Whether it be Poles still smarting over Communist-era misdeeds, Islamic radicals seeking to undo the fall of Muslim civilization, or outraged citizens suing television networks over breasts bared at Superbowl halftime shows, this endless fretting over the past only engenders further dismay. The dead cannot be unkilled, last year's breast cannot be covered today. Let it go.
- Eugene Kittridge
love slashdot. populate it. use it. abuse it. hate it. kill it. miss it. stop following links, they only kill servers.
he completed 52 missions.
to see that the list included many others besides spies.
At last we understand why Bush said "don't forget Poland". Obviously we've been outsourcing all our
intelligence to them.
It was only 16 years ago that Poland threw off communism with the first free elections in the former Soviet bloc. This list likely contains the names of people that did great harm to others (and also many unrelated people). To simply write offf the list as something that should be forgotten, as some have suggested, would be foolish. We as americans must still atone for injustices done to others during the civil rights era, and many europeans are still dealing with the spectres of war from sixty years ago. To "forget" something that happened as recently as sixteen years is foolish and unreasonable.
Karma: Can there be a void?
.. -. - . .-. .-. --- -...
Thank you Slashdot! I'm from Poland and exactly here's the first time I'm reading about this. But I'm a bit worried also. My family name is very popular on the list.
But seriously, most of you got the wrong idea about this thing. Of course it's not like we had 240,000 Bonds here. Those posts mentioning 'snitchers' ('denunciators' maybe) are closer to the real image.
A similar incident happened in Slovenia a year ago, where an Australian (moved there after WW2) published the list of people who spied and people who were beeing watched by the Yugoslavian secret police UDBA.
First the government tried to block access to the list's server, but soon all the people who were interested learned how to use a proxy connection. Their server was slashdotted for a month, becuse the idiot put the list in 800K jpg pictures and so the whole thing was something like 40 GB and difficult to search. After the initial "shock" in the media and public, a month after nobody, there was hardly any interest for the list anymore.
For certain people to blame p2p of supporting terrorism...
In case anyone wants to read the list you can get the torrent Here.
- Qua
nothing to see here, move along
Ehta nyeh IBM, ehta Macintosh!
I can just imagine how it would sound in a movie: My name is Wolschansky, Vojzeh Wolschansky.
Quite frankly, it's always a problem for me in Starbucks, when they ask me about me name to write it on my cup of latte. When I say my real name - there will always be a surprised "Voi... WHAT?" from the poor underpayed Starbucks employee and then some stupid conversation, while the rest of the queue wants to lynch me for the delay. I never know what to do - sometimes I choose a fake English name that sounds remotely like mine (Walter usually), sometimes I say "just W". I wonder how other fellow slashdotters from overseas solve this problem, especially those with weird names that are hard to prononuce and just plain impossible to transcribe in Latin characters.
After all, Starbucks is just Starbucks, but just try to make a hotel reservation spelling your name to a hotel clerk...
First of all, this is not technology related topic so I don't know why it is on /.
The guy, Wildenstein, or whatever, is a complete moron. The list, which is currently being held by the IPN (the official government institution) is going to become public. I assume that some people, like active agents, won't be listed, otherwise this would be the highest possible stupidity.
The Internet. There are few meaningless list on the internet, they differ in contents. You can't be sure which one is the proper one. After all, this is only the name index. Without cataloges (which are in posession of IPN) the list is useless, or in worst case, missleading.
Cheers!
1 - Try enforcing Patents in EU
;-P
2 - Be blocked by Polish vote
3 - Pull your strings in the CIA
4 - Dump Polish spy/snitch/etc names on P2P
5 - Tell Polish officials next time will be worse
6 - Try enforcing Patents in EU...again...
7 - Have the Polish vote in favor
8 - Profit!
9 - BTW, accuse P2P of potential danger to US spies also
10 - Have congress pass laws against anything P2P related
11 - Profit! Again!
PS: later on...
12 - Prove that Windows is P2P because you can share folders and have others search them
13 - Make Windows illegal
14 - Prove that all other OS's suffer from the same
15 - Ban OS's... ban computers... ban technology...
16 - Go live in a cave
17 - De-evolve
18 - Become extinct
19 - Earth Profits!!!
:( Sigh.
1. Mr. Wildstein, the journalist who stole the list, got fired. Now the journalist community boils about this apparent "limiting of free speech". (imo free speech is the right to reveal your own opinions, not stealing others' secrets)
2. The problem with the list is that it contains hardly more info than just names. It is known to contain names of active agents, names of those who cooperated, and names of people, who were observed and potentially viable for "recruitment" even though the contact between the secret service and them never happened. All mixed together and not distinguished from each other in any readable way (just keycode(hash) used in others, non-leaked documents). So the presence on the list may mean trouble to many innocents, because paranoid employes, friends and such may suspect them even if they are not guilty of anything.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
"imo free speech is the right to reveal your own opinions, not stealing others' secrets"
You present these two things as polar opposites, but that's a false choice.
Free speech is not about just your own opinions, free speech is also about the truth.
When the government does something bad, and evil, free speech means revealing the truth, not just saying "Well, in my opinion, something bad happened that we should talk about". Think "pentagon papers".
Personally, I want a list of my fellow citizens who are willing to spy on each other. Any government that solicts its citzens to spy on each other, IMHO deserves to be changed. That's what this list is about.
yeah, but the thing is, now, for Poland's national security, they'd rather be forgotten, thank you very much.
Yeah, they're funny, but try not to take it too far.
The Polish have really had a hard time. There even was a "Polish holocaust". Seriously.
Never heard of it?
That's how successful it was.
This wouldn't have happened had the software patents been legal in EU:
EP5506624: System and method for publishing information about a plurality of secret agents on an Internet compatible system
It only contains names from one administrative province (out of almost 50 which existed back then (today their number is reduced significantly) - so you can imagine what would be the number on list that covers whole cuntry)...and on top of that it can't be trusted - right after release it was edited in uncontrolled way by internauts, who added many names, probably also deleted some... Oh, and this ISN'T the list of spies, this is the list of people who were of interest for the former regime, including also opposition for example.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Of course there are English native speakers who do get it - people like Norman Davies or Timothy Garton Ash, who studied the subject at length. Actually, if you want to understand just a bit of what it is all about read Timothy's book, The File. In that he describes how it all looked like in former East Germany, the only place where they have dealt with communist secret police and its informers in the proper way. Just one piece of information - one third of the population there was informing on the remaining two thirds. Let me repeat that again - out of three East-Germans one was an informer. Do you, dear Americans or British, can imagine at all what it was to live in a society like this? No? Just what I thought.
And we have no real reason to believe that the proportions were significantly different in other soviet bloc countries. After all secret police in each of those countries was organized along the same good soviet guidelines and under careful, loving supervision by soviet KGB personnel. The only problem is that while in Germany and the Czech Republic they have got rid of the former informers and officers of these secret police organizations from the public life and allowed former victims to learn the (sometimes painful) truth about who informed on them - not in Poland. In Poland former communist officials run the government now and the former secret police officers and informers do very well, many of them forming now the business elite of the now supposedly free and democratic country. For years they have done an excellent job at preventing any attempts to actually reveal who was the scum and snitcher and who wasn't.
But finally some of the data has spilled, the amount of interest shows clearly that people do care who was who and thanks to Internet, p2p networks and stuff no one can prevent this. And that's the point of having it up on Slashdot I guess.
Which, BTW, shows that unless you start shooting people in the head with actual, real lead bullets (like in China) they will share whatever files they like and find worth it. Sorry MPAA, RIAA and any other AA out there. No matter how many lawsuits you will create you can't win. Unless you'll start shooting people. But that works only in China for now, and they don't care about copyrights anyway, sorry.
And remember that '00' means 'license to kill'
It's equivalent to an American saying "I don't care if I put CIA/FBI agent's lives in danger".
i a/
The Novak/Plame situation: http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/09/29/novak.c
Chicken fried butter sticks? Do
Now substitute "Nazi" or "Apartheid" or "Abu Ghraib" for "Communist", and see if you believe your own argument.
The truth commission in South Africa is there for a reason. The "Communist Era" as you call it is not even as far back as World War Two--it only ended in 1989. There were atrocities committed. In much of Eastern Europe there has been insufficient lustration, and at the very least something like the Truth Commission would help deal with the lingering resentments people feel. If someone does something and seems to have gotten away with it, you are much more likely to bear a grudge than if they do something but are forced to come clean about it.
Let's put it this way--if Guantanamo becomes a camp for political dissenters in the U.S. and you're an American, would you not want to know which of your neighbors were collaborating with the government to send people there? Wouldn't you want the stories out to provide a lesson so history isn't repeated?
In Lithuania I met a Russian who had been in the KGB prison in Vilnius for 11 years. He took us on a tour of the prison and explained how they would be chained to the ground in unheated rooms (it was -20C outside during the tour), showing us a padded room (with blood-stained burlap still on the walls) where they beat people regularly and fired guns over their heads.
There's a weird disconnect in the West that says that, because the goal was social justice, we should overlook the "excesses" of Communism and not regard their crimes the way Naziism or Apartheid or the genocide in Rwanda is regarded. I think it's this willing amnesia that is at the heart of the problem--we can avoid the messy questions that someone in South Africa or Rwanda has to live with on a daily basis if we all pretend it was a gigantic comedy of errors or a period of simply unskillful government.
The same lack of memory, incidentally, can be said for the South's attitude toward the civil rights struggle in the United States, though at least some criminals are being prosecuted--but hardly enough.
How can we argue that the rest of the world should follow our enlightened example if we're unwilling to look carefully at our own past?
I mean, it's not like there's any double standards on Slashdot, right?
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
Oh, I thought it was "Pics of Posh Spice Leaked On The Internet".
That would have been interesting...
Are there still people looking for porn by googling to "sex" ?
What better way to make sure evil institutions don't rebuild? Punish the people involved.
I forget what 8 was for.
I think you're missing the point: it's not about the ideology, it's about the people following it; more specifically, to what level and what degree.
A bit of perspective here: my father's family are Russian and Lithuanian Jews, and a good 2/3 of them simply vanished in the Holocaust. I'm very glad that the Allies after the war prosecuted the top Nazis, and that later, they and other countries (particularly Israel, for obvious reasons) put a great deal of time and effort into tracking down the ones who escaped. But -- and I don't think I'm alone in this -- the last few prosecutions made me acutely uncomfortable. I really don't see the point in tracking down old men who were brainwashed teenagers then and putting them on trial for something that took place more than half a lifetime ago. Presumably there are a fair number of them still alive, and you know what? I don't care. It's over. Let it go.
BTW, I'm also a Desert Storm vet, and I'm as shocked and horrified as anyone at what happened at Abu Ghraib. But what pisses me off is the whitewash, where they hang a few enlisted grunts out to dry, and the officers and senior NCO's, who IMNSGDHO had to not only know what was going on, but in fact explicitly encourage it, get off without even a black mark in the personnel files. I also believe quite strongly that the appropriate investigations and prosecutions should take place quickly; five or ten years would be much too late. "Justice delayed is justice denied." And if we can't get it done in a reasonable time, then it will be necessary, however distasteful we may find this necessity, to let it go.
The analogy here should be obvious. By all means, prosecute the top people for the crimes of the Polish Communist regime, which were indeed many and terrible. But the low-level informants, the ones who took a few extra zlotys for passing on a name or a photo? For God's sake, people, it's over. Let it go.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The ironing is delicious
Harlem, you must know, is predominately African-American. Some of the residents must own their own apartments.
Furthermore, what do you mean "impossible?"
:) Of course I am. Jerzy Urban is a Jew. If I defend a Jew, that makes me a filthy antisemite. Perfect logic.
I find your ideas intriguing, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
what pisses me off is the whitewash, where they hang a few enlisted grunts out to dry, and the officers and senior NCO's, who IMNSGDHO had to not only know what was going on, but in fact explicitly encourage it, get off without even a black mark in the personnel files
What must be particularly galling is that the man ultimately responsible was re-elected. Further, he picked the guy who wrote the legal justification for torture as our new Attorney General. It's important to remember that while Bush didn't give a direct order to torture, he gave his tacit approval. He even insisted that Rummy stay on, after Rumsfeld twice tried to resign over the scandal. Rumsfeld, in public on the other hand, justified Abu Ghraib by saying that the actions of the terrorists were worse.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
That's not what happened.
Oh, really? How many officers or senior NCO's have been court-martialed, or even Article 15'ed, over what happened at Abu Ghraib? Do you think that any will be, ever?
Okay, maybe "without even a black mark" was an exaggeration -- I'm sure there were some reprimands. But if we're sending junior enlisted to prison, those in the chain of command above them, who knew what was happening and almost certainly ordered them to do it, should pay at least an equal penalty
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Yes. Even without all the other shit we're doing over there, that alone pretty much guarantees generations more of hatred and terror.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Poland has at least 240,000 secret agents, and those are just ones we know about! Dang, that's more than half of one percent of their population!
i agree with both you and the grand parent poster.
Well thank God the media informed everyone of this leak and where to get the information...
"Jim is a spy?! He told me he was a doorknob salesman!"
Just out of curiousity, who did they list in spot #007?
"James Bondokovski"?
Live forever, or die trying.
I'm not saying the U.S. is perfect when it comes to foreign affairs (far from it), but why is it that whenever theres an international crisis whether its genocide, terrorism or humanitarian crimes; why does everyone always yell at the U.S. or the 'West' for ignoring these actions? Why can't the 'East' such as Russia, Japan or China deal with these issues instead of bitching when the U.S. is SENT to deal with the issue (North Korea's nuclear weapons? India and Pakistan? Maybe stretch over and deal with Iran?)
You forgot Poland!
Actually as it turns out, the list is not even the list of "snitches", "spies", or "(would be)informants", but actually a list of *all* workers that had to do anything with the goverment in those times. For example some family members or friends' family got on it, because one was a secretary at some government office, or other which was a police officer in the 50s. You just have to understand that back in those times, if you had a job like that, you *were* with them, or you'd be arrested, or at least questioned... Just FYI.
IPN BU 001198/2009 BONDAR JAN
IPN BU 0194/3298 BONDAR WODZIMIERZ
IPN BU 0604/2022 BONDAR WODZIMIERZ-BOHDAN
IPN BU 00328/1496 BONDARA GRZEGORZ
IPN BU 001134/2463 BONDARA GRZEGORZ
IPN BU 0193/1219 BONDARCZUK FRANCISZEK
IPN BU 00945/545 BONDARCZUK HENRYK
IPN BU 001134/2286 BONDARENKO MIROSAW
IPN BU 00612/3508 BONDAREW JANUSZ
IPN BU 001198/6503 BONDAREW JANUSZ
IPN BU 002081/288 BONDAREWICZ ANNA
IPN BU 002085/354 BONDAREWICZ ANNA DOROTA
IPN BU 001121/255 BONDAREWSKI BOGDAN
IPN BU 0854/1102 BONDARUK KONSTANTY
IPN BU 0218/1937 BONDARUK STEFAN
IPN BU 0772/2266 BONDARYK HENRYKA
IPN BU 001134/4208 BONDER BARBARA HELENA
IPN BU 0988/27 BONDER CZESAW
IPN BU 0806/1819 BONDER EMIL
IPN BU 093/6 BONDER HELENA
IPN BU 00399/115 BONDER HELENA
IPN BU 0242/2845 BONDER KRZYSZTOF ANDRZEJ
IPN BU 0242/1140 BONDER RYSZARD
IPN BU 00257/376 BONDER RYSZARD
IPN BU 001102/1443 BONDER RYSZARD
IPN BU 01000/1807 BONDERSKA IRENA
IPN BU 0855/2319 BONDOS WADYSAW
IPN BU 52/70 BONDYRA EDWARD
IPN BU 02042/550 BONDYRA JERZY
IPN BU PF 970/203 BONDYRA JOLANTA
IPN BU 0988/1161 BONDYRA ZOFIA
.. the most interesting part of this story to me is not that there's a "leaked list of polish spies" on the internet, it is the fact that there are 240,000 people out there willing to live covert and dishonest lives 'in the name of something'.
.. and what do you know, they were ...
how many 'spies' are there in the american homelands? will we ever know? just yesterday i had a drink with someone i suspected, pretty much within 5 minutes, of being a CIA agent
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Anyway, my point is, in the '80s he was actually on the other side of the fence, working for the opposition. In 1981 when the communist government introduced the martial law and outlawed Solidarity which was quickly followed by massive detentions he was one of those detained. I remember it well as my mother came home crying that her brother was snatched by WRON (the martial law enforcement agency formed after instituting the martial law) in the middle of the night and detained god knows where. He was released a few weeks later after being forced to sign some shit declaring that he would not work to subvert the communist government ever again. This is most likely why he's on the Wildstein list.
Of course, right after his release it was business as usual for him: printing Solidarity leaflets, distributing Solidarity news magazines and smuggling letters from the loved ones out of the detention centers.
I'm quite angry this list has surfaced as it tarnishes my uncle's name who actually fought the regime and risked his safety numerous times in defending the cause (and no he was not an informant or a double agent).
I just hope this list isn't taken too seriously and does not lead to a witch hunt of sorts because a lot of innocent people will be harmed (though my uncle is "safe" in this respect: he died of a stroke about ten years ago).
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Can somebody check if Cowboy Neal (not sure how it will be in in polish) is there?
> "Masses are everything, one person means nothing" -- an old communist motto.
"Kill them all. Let God sort them out."
Many groups have put ideology above individual human beings. Saying "it's Communist!!" is both incorrect and unnecessary - the Cold War is over now, you know, and Communism is no longer the Big Scary Enemy. (It may or may not be bad, but it's no longer reasonable to have knee-jerk reactions about it - that's so 80's...)
so this is how the polish coders came out in second place on the world programming challenge..
I was wondering how that happened..
It doesn't suprise me that india was in 67th place, india is great for outsourcing COBOL code, however
I challenge you to obtain the source code from those you outsourced to.. Hahahaha vendor-lockin!!
Just say no to license servers!!
But the low-level informants, the ones who took a few extra zlotys for passing on a name or a photo? For God's sake, people, it's over. Let it go.
Except the camp guards and Nazi party members who participated in any way in the Holocaust were indeed prosecuted, no matter how low their involvement was. Remember all the cases of American residents being deported for trial in Israel? Demianiuk (sp.?) for example?
They may be low level, but it's that kind of passing the buck "I vas just following ordahs!" that permits these crimes to take place. That used to be a key understanding of the Holocaust, but it seems increasingly lost.
Yes, Rumsfeld should at a minimum resign in disgrace, but Lynndie England had a responsibility to refuse illegal orders that she abandoned with relish. I don't let her or the informants off just because they weren't Jaruzelski or Rumsfeld.
I was under the impression that spies always used fake names anyway. No one is as flagrant or foolish as James Bond, even though we all love him.
Not quite as serious, but all computer geeks should appreciate the Polish mathematician Leonhard Euler, and therefore should not put up with stupid Polish jokes.
I hate Liberals and Conservatives.
If you are a Liberal or a Conservative, then HAVE A NICE DAY!
Courage.
NAKity NAK. (Don't talk back.)
Well, I live in Poland, and the fact of the matter is I don't really get people. Take my case, for example. My surname doesn't appear on the list at all, nor does my Mom's maiden name, but I happen to have had a family member who was very, very high on the list of people who were seriously against the Communistic regime and were definitely not to be trusted by the regime. Over the war, he was among those who fought a Maquis-type battle in Poland against the Nazis. Now, this man, my great uncle if I'm correct, had adopted a different surname to use in Poland (since his real name - same as mine - was recognized everywhere due to his actions). I searched Wildstein's List for it figuring that he should've had a file. Indeed, there are ten names that could be him - same first name, same surname. But how can I be sure that any of these are actually him? See, the thing is, there's 240000 people on that list. That's a lot, yes. But if you happen to notice the name of a person you know, it doesn't mean nothing. Because there's 40 million people in the country, and probably another 5-10 million people who either aren't alive anymore, or live outside of the country. That's a whole lot more. The chances that the person you saw on the list is the person you know are perhaps big, but they're far from being even near 100%. That said, there's also the whole bad guy versus good guy thing, cos both guys had their own files, and the original coding system of said files (which apparently shows who was which) isn't included with the list. So seeing a familiar name doesn't even mean anything, because - even if it IS the person you're thinking about - they might've just as well been good and gotten written up for that. They might've been snitched on by someone else and ended up there. They might've been forced to work for the Communists in some capacity so the Communists wouldn't figure out what they really did - and that happened a whole lot too. For that matter, their only crime might've been their profession. Journalists, for instance, or policemen, or clergymen, or nuclear physicists... the list goes on and on. Not to mention there isn't any version of the list that one can be 100% sure of. Not one that's available to the public, anyway, since everyone who has access to the file can change it over any which way they want, then post it on their own site. In effect, the list means nothing at all. Well, almost nothing. It does show how very much the population of this country needs to find out the truth, because everyone is still so unsure of everything that happened in those years back then. That it's more important than pornographical sites says it all. Personally, I'm not sure what to think of it. It's good that it's been released, I think - since it should make for a good stepping stone for finally releasing the truth (up to now, as far as I know, the only way to find out if you had a file, was to go to Warsaw personally - and not many people can afford the money, or time, to do that). But it's put madness into the society, because few people realize that having your name on that list means, in fact, little to nothing. Unless of course you have a very rare surname. Like mine. My family has nothing to fear, apparently.
Darn, I didn't know I should add br's into that. First time post and all that, and I can't figure out how to change it... Sorry!