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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...
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.
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.
"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.
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.
he completed 52 missions.
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
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
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
The only thing I really find bad is that a lot of people are on the list who are likely innocent like people refusing to become snitches or worse, even victims.
Regarding the spies themselves: They had it coming to them. They destroyed lives of neighbours, co-workers and even friends and family, so I honestly don't give a rats ass what happens to them.
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.
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?
:) Of course I am. Jerzy Urban is a Jew. If I defend a Jew, that makes me a filthy antisemite. Perfect logic.
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.