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Web Hosting For Privacy Activists?
BritishColumbian writes "I'm thinking about setting up a Web site driven by user submissions. I was wondering which locations have the most liberal (i.e., libertarian) privacy laws. There are some great hosts in the US, however there have been so many FBI requests for user data that I don't want a server hosted under US jurisdiction. Does anyone have any thoughts/suggestions as to a suitable jurisdiction? It doesn't look like Sealand's HavenCo is guaranteed to be privacy-friendly any more."
Tor has a few blog hosts available. That way nobody would know who's hosting it. Of course, only tor clients could see the blog....
OTOH, you could just create an account on blogspot while you're on Tor, and only post to it via Tor. That should keep you kinda safe, as long as you don't reveal yourself on the blog.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ They will allow you to pay in cash, anonymously.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
xs4all.nl is brave enough to face $cientology in a 10-year lasting court case. And winning!
You have a few options, the first being Havenco in the micro-nation of Sealand, which is an old WWII off shore platform that claims sovereignty. They have not, however, been recognized by other states, leaving their international legal status in limbo. They do claim, however, to not be under the jurisdiction of other nations laws.
Your second and cheaper option is hosting via Tor network. There are a few blogs and other sites hosted via Tor, although there are some technical difficulties involved.
Be aware, if your privacy blog angers a powerful entity such as China, they can choose to just block all traffic to your site, rather than forcing your site offline.
--Boycott Nokia - Stop corporate Greed. Nokia, connecting people with the unemployment line.
The US is good on free speech but it is not good on privacy which is the point of this article. As far as privacy is concerned, Privacy International ranks both Germany and Canada very highly. I'd recommend Canada to get around Germany's prohibited speech laws.
In a truly libertarian system, they wouldn't dare do that, because then nobody would use their services; furthermore, they'd be afraid of retaliation.
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
You might want to consider the Scandinavian/Baltic region.
;-)
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Greenland are all pretty protective about their citizens privacy. Provided your sites contain only "controversial" (but not illegal) content, you would definitely be in the clear!
Illegal content would be: child pornography, copyrighted material for which you do not have the distribution right, neo-nazi propaganda and holocausts-denial. Pretty much everything else is accepted. Including blasphemies drawings
Germany is also a good bet - but you would have to add "scientology" to the list of illegal content
- Jesper
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
There are some laws that loosely requests that members of a bulletin board shall be known, but I have never heard about anyone being even brought to court in such cases and the verification is at most an email address, and considering the volatility of email addresses that's no big problem. The "Freedom of speech" is relatively strong, and as long as you don't actively push for breaking the law in ways that can be considered worthy to being brought to court it's no big issue.
Having a system with a moderation (maybe like the Slashdot moderation) may still be a good idea to be able to cool down anything that goes over the edge.
There have been some fuzz earlier about the Swedish site Flashback for promoting cracks and computer criminality, but it actually hasn't ended up into anything of substance. Maybe you even can have your own forum at that site! In most cases the police will just look and thing "Well - another set of nuts - and go for some more coffee...". Considering that there are bigger fish to fry and the end result of the Pirate Bay story it will take a lot of pressure before anything happens if somebody in the US wants to do a crackdown. And it's likely to hit the newspapers too even before there is time to do something... And essentially the police is more into the watching part and avoids the acting part since it means paperwork. And they have better things to watch for than a bulletin board where the most of the discussion will fall under the freedom of speech anyway.
Crimes that will put you on the radar of the police are more like driving under the influence (0.02% limit), speeding (fixed speed cameras at random locations on major roads) and drugs, both narcotics and illegal sales of prescription drugs but I don't think that the first two of these will apply for a web server hosting anyway.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
you really need to hook it up to a dynamo that's driven by the water coming in through the fill line. Use that to charge the battery and you can really decrease the amount of maintenance.
There are two big things with this.
:)
:) (short story, our customer handed over an exploited server. It was only because it was exploited, it had nothing to do with the content. They had already put a new machine up with restored content, as good exploit protocol suggests.)
:)
First, any provider can and will give in to pressures. Just because they're not "in" the United States doesn't mean that they won't be leaned on by the United States.
Every provider connects to someone else. Otherwise, you being on your residential Cable/DSL/whatever wouldn't be able to reach Rajhed's IndiaPorn.
Being that it is true, the gov't could simply lean on American held companies, or companies with American interests, to find out who you are, find out what's on your servers, or simply get you unplugged. Just because you host at Sealand, in central Siberia, or whereever, you still run the risk of provider A strongly encouraging provider B to do something about it.
Been there. Done that. Got the Federal agent sitting in my office about it. Of course, I played stupid until I found out what the hell he was talking about, and then made some phone calls to find out the rest of the story.
Second, what the hell do you think you're going to say, that will get the feds knocking on your door, on the hosting facility's door, etc, etc?
I run http://freeinternetpress.com/ . If you read what we say, and have said for years, by all the legend of the National Security letters, we quite likely should have our phones tapped, servers confiscated, and been visiting Southeastern Cuba for more than a few days.
In reality though, we've had every (like, EVERY) intelligence agency in the world read our news. That was scary at first, but I made some friends (through other means) who had worked in intelligence, and they broke the bad news to me. The feds aren't watching us because they're interested in getting us. They're watching us because we are a good news source. Even though we've NEVER had a single contact regarding Free Internet Press, we're read every day. Above that, you'd be surprised to find out how many intelligence agencies there are out there. It took us quite a while to decode a lot of the hostnames, even when we ran them up and down a few of our grapevines. My favorite that I still like to brag about is eop.gov . They were monthly visitors.
I haven't bothered to re-check our logs to see what odd hostnames come in any more. It's entertaining, but serves no other purpose.
I'm VERY close with my hosting company. (like, VERY). I'd know the moment they were sniffing around, mostly because I'd be the one to open the cabinet door for them.
If it came down to it though, we'd just dump the hostname off to another server (I have a few spare hosting accounts in my pocket, all under different people's names, at different facilities), and put it right back online with a big notice "WE GOT SHUT DOWN BY THE FEDS, Here's the documents!"
If I didn't do it, there are a dozen or so other people with enough access to do it for me. Like, if I ended up in Southeastern Cuba, with an orange jumpsuit, a blanket, and a copy of the Koran (they issue 'em to everyone, from what I understand).
So, what's going to keep you from landing in hot water?
1) Don't say you're going to kill someone.
2) Don't threaten to blow something up.
3) Don't make claims above and beyond anything you're really willing to do.
For example (EXAMPLE!) if you were to say, "I'm going to blow up the Whitehouse tomorrow", if you're not serious, you're stupid for saying it. If you are serious, you deserve to get beaten down and thrown in jail for a long time. While I'll disagree with
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
That's old data. Greece(?!) is number one now. The trend indicates that "off the planet" is the best option.
What?