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

Already down - thanks slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

No need to wait for two weeks to shut down a site. Just submit it to slashdot
and get it shut down in minutes.

Re:Already down - thanks slashdot

[eneville]

No need to wait for two weeks to shut down a site. Just submit it to slashdot
and get it shut down in minutes. mirrored: http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/e231a81023b07bf39 9b68b2c295e9736/index.html http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/deb36db488f175511 ebd77b98603b50f/index.html

Re:Already down - thanks slashdot

[johnyoung]

Right, Cryptome happily chokes on slashdot, but not to worry, mirrors are available as noted below.

Cryptome and its affiliated sites will continue with another ISP, in the US or elsewhere. Or if necessary, underground, or via means not easily shuttered, or by way of whatever is invented for opposing technologies of information control (credit to Steven Wright, author of The Technologies of Political Control: http://cryptome.org/stoa-atpc.htm).

any good soul?

[eneville]

Is there anyone who would like to put up some bounty for having this hosted in a country with liberal hosting rules, such as Sweden perhaps?

Re:any good soul?

[rs79]

Why bother?

I was able to read all of the pages peviously withdrawn with the exception of one (the Irish injunction) in minutes without going to cryptome. The rest of the site can also be found in the usual places.

If people are dumb to know about things like this I suspect we sholdn't go out of our way to tell them.

Here's an excerpt from a document withdrawn in 2001:


UNDERSTANDING AND HELPING INDIVIDUALS WITH HOMOSEXUAL PROBLEMS

Copyright 1995

LDS Social Services

USE OF THE DOCUMENT

This training document has been prepared for the exclusive use of LDS Social Services to assist staff, interns, and contract providers in their work with individuals having homosexual problems. Because the document is approved only for "in house" use, it should not be reproduced nor distributed to others outside of LDS Social Services.

UNDERSTANDING AND HELPING INDIVIDUALS WITH HOMOSEXUAL PROBLEMS

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

For more than 100 years homosexuality has been a topic of scientific and psychotherapy inquiry and debate. Freud and his contemporaries viewed homosexuality as a deviation or "inversion" of natural psychosexual development, the causes of which being as varied and numerous as the theorists espousing them. According to Freud, the deviation resulted primarily from a distorted parent-child relationship which led the child to reject his or her own gender role and identify with the opposite~sexed parent. This view received considerable empirical support later in this century through studies by Irving Bieber and a number of other researchers (Siegelmm, 1987).


But! These things hang by a thread. I would posit that people who want them archived should post them to usenet. A lot. In a world where news postings are routinely made into "google ad blogs" there'll be lots of copies on many servers around the world.

Some people think you can delete things off the Internet. They are fools.

(Note the invalid copyright notice on the above document. You have to say who it's copyrighted by, not just a date. Of course as an excerpt here for academic purposes it's covered by fair use under US copyright law).

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.

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?

mirrors

[e**(i pi)-1]

cryptome has several mirrors. Here is one:
http://cryptome.quintessenz.org/mirror/cryptome-sh ut.htm

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.

wrong.

[sethawoolley]

The Berne Conventions eliminated the need to even post a copyright notice. Copyright automatically falls into the hands of the "creator" the moment it is created.

if you want to go after somebody with a DMCA notice on something with no notice and no registration, you can easily register the copyright years later, then go after them.

Re:Pcik a new ISP

[sphealey]

> So a web site has a problem with their
> ISP. So friggin' what? Pick a different ISP.

Cryptome IS watched by various intelligence, counterintelligence, and law enforcement agencies. Young posted a funny exchange he had once with the "duty officer of the day" at a TLA; the guy told him that a certain document had been released accidently; could it please be withdrawn? Young of course said no, so the guy then said "I guess it is too late for this conversation not to be posted too?" - making it clear that he knew very well how Young runs Cryptome.

So it may be very difficult for him to find another ISP. Maybe one related to Qwest will take him on, but they ISP has to know they WILL come under additional law enforcement pressure just as a result of hosting that site.

sPh

well with that kind of use policy.. no wonder

[fuckeverything]

from their acceptable use thingy: "Other Activities -- Engaging in activities, whether lawful or unlawful, that Verio determines to be harmful to its subscribers, operations, reputation, goodwill, or customer relations." so they pretty much tell you straight away, that they pull your site once they dont like what you are hosting anymore.

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.