Cryptome to be Terminated by Verio/NTT

George Maschke writes "Cryptome, a website concerned with encryption, privacy, and government secrecy, has received two weeks' notice from Verio that its service will be terminated for unspecified "violation of [its] Acceptable Use Policy." Cryptome has a history of making publicly available documents and information that governments would rather keep secret. For the notice, and a public response by Cryptome webmaster John Young, see Cryptome Shutdown by Verio/NTT."

Comments

Long Term Ramifications

[nurb432]

Sites like this could simply be 'blacklisted' if no ISP wil pick them up due fears of prosecution.

Good way to restrict 'evil' information dissemination to the masses.

What is next, 'hate' sites being cut loose? Or 'independent freedom talk' being removed from the digital landscape?

Yet, VERIO.NET are happy to host spammers

[merc]

Of course, it's VERIO's network, they're free to have whomever they like as customers. I just find it dubious that they're TOS'ing Young for abuse or violations of their AUP when they simultaneously decide to host spamming scum:

http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings.lasso?isp=ver io.net

Re:Every day...

[plaxion]

You are coming to a sad realization. Cancel or Allow?

Freedom to dissent?

[k1e0x]

We don't allow this kind of dissent in Soviet Amerika. If your not with us your a terrorist.

Ok so that's a bit over the top but really what's this coming to? Where do we draw the line on Police state America?

Argh! This sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Cryptome has been an indispensable ally in many wars against secrecy, ineptitude, corruption, and evil-doing conspiracies all over the place. John mirrored a couple of separate batches of stuff I had a minor involvement in, and in both cases the world was made (in a tiny way) a less crappy place by his actions.

It's also a sad day in it's message that there is now, ultimately, no genuine free speech left on the net. If the state really really wants to suppress your message, it can do so. It's slow, labour intensive, and expensive for them to do this, so they don't usually bother; but when they need The System to function, it does.

Re:any good soul?

[fwr]

It's even worse than that. You don't actually need a "valid" copyright notice in the US anymore. Works are copyrighted automatically. It certainly helps to have a copyright notice. It also helps to have your works registered with the government, but that is usually not necessary unless you are about to sue someone (just like Novell and SCO scrambled to register their claimed copyrights in the Unix source; funny they didn't feel the need to register them before the lawsuits).

Now one can argue that as soon as the owner places a work on a publicly accessible location, such as a blog or on Slashdot, that you implicitly grant others the right to copy that work. That may be a stretch, and would depend on the situation. If the acceptable use policy of the site says that all submissions are reproducible that is much different than if you have a site in which you have to login and pay a fee in order to retrieve documents or other works (think DRM free pay music sites). However, just because some information is "leaked" one way or another, such as the LDS document sited, it does not mean that the owner of the work gave the permission or relinquished their rights. Hence, even the "fair use" of a small part of their work may not pass muster. One could argue that their internal documents on how they treat homosexuality are not only copyrighted, but in fact Trade Secrets, and there is no fair use of Trade Secrets. As long as they took reasonable steps to protect those items the leaking of them does not change their status. So it could be said that the web site should not have published the documents has they done something as simple as read the beginning which indicated they were confidential internal documents.

Re:Oer the land of the unfree and the home of weas

[NormalVisual]

The ISP just weasely pulls the plug without negotiation just because some guy with a British accent rings up?

I don't think that's what happened. I suspect what happened was that someone in the US government saw something they didn't like, and sent a National Security Letter or other such silliness to Verio. Verio of course can't legally disclose that, but given that Verio had been always been very forthright with John Young in the past but is being tight-lipped about the situation now, I think it's quite possible that something like this is behind Verio's actions.

Gotta love living in a nation where the government makes you do their own damn police work against someone else against your will, and then threatens you with jail if you say anything about it.