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Greek Blog Aggregator Arrested
arcanumas writes to tell us that Greek authorities have raided the house of Antonis Tsipropoulos, administrator of the blog aggregation site Blogme.gr. His hard drive was seized and he was arrested. The impetus was a satiric website, not named in the stories, that apparently offended a Greek public figure (also unnamed). The site in question was not hosted by Tsipropoulos but was merely linked to by his RSS fed. From the first article: "The developing story coincides with the Internet Governance Forum being hosted in Athens this week, to be attended by Internet luminaries, entrepreneurs, and activists like Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, and Joi Ito and featuring panels on Openness and Freedom of Expression."
It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster. - Voltaire
Seems to be a monster in the Greek government. I would love to hear some of the luminaries at the conference discuss this and embaress the Greek govenment publicly.
I know sometimes it's hard for us living in the US to remember that our case of (mostly) free speech is not common in other parts of the world.
Even Great Britain has no guarantee of free speech, per se.
Now, if only we could start spreading that around the world instead of spreading DemocracyTM, real democracy might ensue.
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Obviously it is not illegal. The guy was set free the next day. And after all this publicity, I suspect that he will have no problem being acquited in trial.
This is yet another example of litigation used as a means of threat. Unfortunately, this doesn't happen around Greece only. The guys that started all this probably don't have a chance in court, but they sure caused a whole lot of trouble to that guy. I only hope that he will countersue them for moral damage and demand a shitload of money in compensation.
They would have done a better job. Probably framed him for downloading child porn, and avoided all this bad publicity.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?