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German Wikileaks Domain Suspended Without Warning
mb writes to mention that Germany has gone one step further in impeding access to Wikileaks. Germany's registration authority, DENIC, recently suspended Wikileaks.de without notice. "The action comes two weeks after the house of the German WikiLeaks domain sponsor, Theodor Reppe, was searched by German authorities. Police documentation shows that the March 24, 2009 raid was triggered by WikiLeaks' publication of Australia's proposed secret internet censorship list. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) told Australian journalists that they did not request the intervention of the German government."
Who leaked it!
...friggin' nazi's? Or is that wrong. Very wrong.
I read about this story on Wikileak's site (http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Germany_muzzles_Wikileaks)
This seems like Germany improperly suspending a domain name, but I don't think they are censoring any information in this move.
.... this is why a decentralized Internet with no intelligence on the switches is important. Because of that, Wikileaks was able to have multiple hosts in multiple countries that are affected by very different sets of laws and busybodies. Even though two major players got together to knock Wikileaks off the Internet, it still is humming along quite nicely.
Folks, fear the day that somebody requests control over who gets to have access to the Internet (Obama, I'm looking at you) and who gets routed where. Yes, QoS is technically going in that direction, but it is still difficult to abuse that for the purpose of knocking random offenders of the Internet. If that somebody happens to be The Government, you can be sure that a) all other governments will want the same control, and b) diplomacy and general government douchbaggery will only leave the blandest, least offensive and best lobbied/bribed sites up and running. Everything else will have moved underground, where again, you'll have to know the right people to get access to the good stuff.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Lobbying - the 'unofficial' 'democracy'. Shaping societies since stone ages.
If you do something we don't like, we come to your home and search every last corner of it. We'll take your domain and publicly link you to child pornography.
You and I speaking about the same group chief?
The group that published, among other things, leaked ACTA documents?
Cause folk who are willing to play host to that sort of item are doing a far far greater service to us than a hundred Pirate Bays.
A lot of what he said is illogical and untrue. Wikileaks does fact check, and in fact if what they posted wasn't true then it wouldn't be so controversial, and governments around the world wouldn't be attempting to shut them down. And no they don't post juvenile and second rate stories; a lot of what they publish is of important political and human interest.
Well it seems I've unintentionally replied to the GP in a round-about way.
Transparency is transparency. List what items have they hosted that you felt shouldn't have been up? I can almost guareentee you that someone out there can give you a reason why they should have been.
Are you sure you understand what Wikileaks is all about? It is precisely about getting information that has been concealed from the public out so that knowledge of the truth of the world can be available. Most people live in a pretty strange dream world where there are "good guys" and "bad guys" and some really strange notions that are used to divide the world into factions that intend to kill one another.
As to your allegations of making information available for "identity theft" you are out of your head. There is a bigger problem. No one can steal an identity. What people can do is make others think that they are someone else. That is not "theft." That is fraud. The people being stolen from through the use of fraudulent means are the people who most depend on a system of identification that puts numeric tags on everyone for the purposes of tracking and controlling them. And when someone pretends to be someone else in order to fool someone else into giving them money, goods or services, in what bizarro world is it the "fault" of the person whose identity was forged or mimicked? "Identity theft" is the name given to fraudulent activity to make it seem as though the "victim" is the person whose identity was copied when the actual victims are those who were fooled by the fraudster. All of this is facilitated by these numeric tags and data records that are assigned to people. This system was created to make it easier to track and trust individuals for business purposes and somehow, the burden and the risk of managing such a system whose primary designers and beneficiaries are government and big money institutions has been placed on the shoulders of the individuals.
You might think your identity lies in the numbers and data records assigned to you. If you do, then you have bought into their game hook line and sinker. I don't. Stay out of debt and you will stay off of their system. People can attempt to "steal my identity" all they want, but since I stay out of debt, there is no way I can be harmed. (Yes, I know that increasingly employers and governments are using credit scores to determine if someone can be trusted... what a big dumb idea that is!)
OK, here's an ironic one: they posted a list of members of the British National Party.
Now, I don't agree with the BNP's politics, and therefore I don't vote for them, but I also don't support rules that are prejudiced against people purely on account of their membership of a certain political party. Such rules are, IMHO, far more dangerous to the democratic process than anything they are likely to prevent.
Wikileaks, supposedly proud of the way it helps the underdog to fight oppressive governments and the laws they use to silence dissent, outed an entire group of people, and cost several of them their jobs as a result.
If that's not a clear enough case, then let me provide a hypothetical example to go with it. Let's suppose that you, personally, have been wrongfully accused of committing a heinous crime. Your country, having regard for due process, requires you to attend a court case to determine your innocence or guilt.
Let us suppose that, mindful of the rule that one is innocent until proven guilty, the judge orders that your identity not be disclosed by the media until the case has concluded. However, anyone in open court can clearly see that you are there, and perhaps one of those people, knowing how heinous the crime you (might have) committed is, decides to post the case details, including your identity, on Wikileaks.
The following day, you get home from court to find an angry mob waiting outside your home, which has been extensively vandalised because obviously if you're in court then you did something wrong and you deserved it. Think this couldn't happen to you? Try looking up what happened to the paediatrician who looked a bit like a low-res photo of a suspected paedophile that was published in a British newspaper.
Sometimes, there are good reasons to keep things secret, and revealing those things publicly does real damage and has no redeeming value whatsoever. Were this not the case, there would be no need for classifications for official secrets, the law wouldn't allow confidentiality clauses in commercial agreements, people wouldn't care about privacy, no-one would have invented data protection laws... Any organisation that makes no attempt to distinguish legitimate cases where secrecy should be respected and repeats any information given to it no matter the implications is a danger to society, and I have no qualms whatsoever about squishing them with any laws and/or firearms that come to hand. That is, after all, no worse than the fate that such an organisation will inevitably inflict on someone innocent, sooner or later.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
so this MIGHT be a technical problem, though this still highly alarms me, since I am a political activist in germany, myself...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
It's scary how many posters here apparently can't tell the difference between (a) censoring a list of links, mainly to child porn, that is, rightly or wrongly, illegal to redistribute in the country concerned; and (b) killing or incarcerating millions based only on racial/religious prejudice.
The Nazis were putting people in prison for political reasons long before they created death camps. There is some historical relevance here, but unfortunately it has grown into a cliche and thus become mundane. In the 1930s people didn't care that it was Jews and homosexuals, and today people don't care that it is pedophiles. We all need something to hate.
And really, it's all bullshit, FUD, lies and propaganda. The "child porn" on these lists isn't that of children being kidnapped and forced to be sex slaves, it is modeling sites and political sites like Wikileaks. The truth shall set you free. Censorship will always subvert the truth.
In order for anything to appear on Wikileaks its secrecy must already have been compromised. Wikileaks merely makes this fact public. Thus when one of the very few things that should legitimately be kept secret appears there it is evidence that someone is incompetent; not that Wikileaks is irresponsible.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Blocking internet links is not going to solve the child pornography problem. Hunting down and imprisoning the people who make child porn, while a lot more difficult thing to do, and certainly a lot more expensive, is by far the better way to go about it and might actually produce real results.
But this isn't about child pornography. It's about censoring a website which is dedicated to ensuring transparency in government - and yes, that is exactly the sort of thing that leads to the sort of atrocities that you mention. If you had been paying attention to the controversy over the Australian censorship list, you might have understood that and not posted something as ignorant as what you did.
It amazes me that we're only a couple generations removed from WWII, and still have fascist and dictatorship governments all over the world, yet the very things that those governments are condemned for doing are permissible if it's western democracies doing them.
The whole "godwin" thing irritates the hell out of me. Why shouldn't we make comparisons to the nazis (or Stalin or any of the other destructive dictatorships out there, recent or not?) How exactly is it bad to make comparisons to the worst of humanity's behavior over the last century? Is that not how we determine just how to recognize and stop such behavior before it gets a foothold?
It's like another saying that still irritates me (and I'm not hardly young anymore) - "Judge ye not, lest ye be judged." - if we can't exercise judgement of others, then just how the hell are we supposed to solve the problems that evil sonsabitches bring to this world? Random guessing? (Wait, that'd be the US justice system, sorry)... the whole FUCKING CONCEPT OF HUMAN SENTIENCE demands that we judge the environment we live in at all times, including our fellow sentients, in order to survive...
I suspect that particular saying was introduced to human culture by people who *didn't* want the average joe judging their actions, because of what they were doing...
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Between the years of 1940 and 1945, the were no active .de domain names.
Coincidence? I think not.
You are incredibly brave.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Arguing the 'essential' nature of secrets with me is not likely a productive experience, which if you peruse my comment history concerning that, would be clear. I'm of the "secrets are a bad thing" camp. The only reason to keep secrets currently is the imbalance of power between those who have the most to hide and those who just think they do. And the only way to overcome that imbalance is to start exposing those at the top and working your way down to the bottom.
Which is why I stated my request as "list the things that you don't think should be up there" rather than "explain to me why secrets should kept"
In regards to your actual example, you will also remember I stated that for any item you listed, someone should be able to come up with a reason for it.
Here is my world view. There may be secrets you'd like to keep about yourself. There may be ideas, fantasies, even events in your life that you don't want shared with the world.
But a political party is by definition a public entity. You are attempting, by your membership, to guide public and government opinion. Your membership to a party should not be a secret. Not in Britain. There are countries in this world where that would be different. But Britain is not one of them. It is not a tyranny. It is not run by a government that is going to go and shove these people into internment camps. The BNP has a history of attempting to play the 'man in the shadows' of attempting to get people into position of authority while hiding their affiliation. This, IMO, is wrong. Even if they weren't the more legitimate sibling of the Nazi's and KKK.
The McCarthy Era of America was a shame specifically because what happened after people were fingered as Communists then was wrong, not because people were outed in the first place.
Dude, have you seen that web site? I'd want to ban it too, at least until it got a serious redesign... ;)
While there is no real loss of access to the information or loss of information itself, the loss of the wikileak.de domain is bad for those who prefer to use it. As has been argued elsewhere in these comments, this is censorship and it is wrong (even if it was accidental or some misunderstanding).
How do we prevent this or restore this? The wikileak system should be more distrubuted. OK, it probably already is pretty distributed, especially when you account for the language- or country-specific domains. However, maybe we can do more? WikiTaxi (http://www.wikitaxi.org/delphi/doku.php/products/wikitaxi/index) is something I just learned about today and it looks quite interesting. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to bring down a P2P version of a wikileak website? I don't know the technical details of how to set it up, but there are a lot of incredibly smart programmers out there who can make it happen.
I hope this comment is well received... I could have moderated instead!
Persecutors will be violated!