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Censorship Struggle Underway In Iceland
jon jonson writes "Information from the collapsed Icelandic bank Kaupthing has been leaked to WikiLeaks, revealing billions in insider loans, and the bank has been working day and night to censor the information contained in the document. Last night at 6:55pm GMT, they served an injunction against the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service, five minutes before the 7pm news was due to be aired. The TV station just displayed the WikiLeaks URL instead. They've also injuncted Iceland's national radio, banning all discussion about the contents of the document, and they are actively trying to censor the rest of the Icelandic media along with WikiLeaks."
Kaupthing had fallen over and if they hadn't tried to stop people finding out, it wouldn't have been posted to Slashdot and I and many others would never have known. We need a name for when attempted censorship leads to wider distribution of the information. The Kaupthing effect, perhaps?
Good thing WikiLeaks is still alive and kicking
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
revealing billions in insider loans,
Like most wikileaks documents, I've found it nearly impossible to verify the high level claim (insider trading) off the information provided. They always seem to drop the ball on writing down their analysis...or letting others (otherwise, it's NOT a wiki!). I expect several pages of summary and analysis, but instead, just broad claims with little or no references or supporting facts.
For those of us who aren't experts in Icelandic corporations and banking, here's a sample, after some googling- one of the listed parties is a Robert Tchenguiz.
If the claims in that blog posting are true, 500BN of Iceland's citizens' money flew out the door in "loans" to tax haven countries.
Please help metamoderate.
And since we are talking about Iceland, pretty strong chilling effect might kick in as well.
Ezekiel 23:20
'nuff said
-- Computers are not intelligent. They just think they are.
The bank is owned by the goverment.
Exception Duck - may or may not contain chicken.
When the government starts censoring things, I find that it is usually because of national security issues more than anything else.
I've seen quite the opposite. Censoring is much more likely to be about covering your ass than about national security.
You do know that national security is a synonym for political embarrassment, don't you?
The police that are mandating the censorship are also owned by the government.
And to complete the farce, the newsroom being censored is ALSO OWNED BY THE STUPID GOVERNMENT.
Jag pratar lite svenska.
If it was a bunch of lies, then the bank officials would have pointed that out. That they are scrambling to censor is proof this is absolutly 100% legit. kind of nice of them to remove any doubt eh?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Don't forget about the children.
Won't someone think of the children?
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
* Main Entry: 2censor
* Function: transitive verb
* Inflected Form(s): censored; censoring \sen(t)-s-ri, sen(t)s-ri\
* Date: 1882
: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable ; also : to suppress or delete as objectionable
If a company tries to flex its muscle to influence lawmakers, it is. Indirect, but still.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There's no such word as injuncted. "to issue an injunction" is to "enjoin", so the form needed here is enjoined.
To protect private interests against the public's need to know.
This is the stuff that we should be angry about. Not putting some trailer-trash families in rehabilitation programs discussed about in the recent front page article (That's the one with the hyperbole about 24hr surveillance BTW).
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
We (in the USA) still have no idea where our TARP funds went. And no documentation likely to appear on Wikileaks either. When our gov't asked the banks what they did with the money we gave them, they just replied, "We'd rather not say".
Have gnu, will travel.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censoring
http://mw1.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censorship
What part of those definitions require that governments be involved again?
And no, just because it doesn't fit your needlessly restricted definition of censorship doesn't mean that it isn't censorship.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
But wait, there's more! According to my favorite Icelandic blogger, the commissioner who issued the injunction has a son who is or was a spokesman for the bank, and another who was an executive and the recipient of one of the no-payments loans.
Iceland is a close-knit society. The anger there is fueled by a sense of betrayal that people from big heterogeneous countries can't fully appreciate.
Once this shit hits the internet - it's out there. There is no undo button or magical legal action you can take to cover it up anymore.
You'd be better off to admit you fucked up and spend your efforts cleaning up the mess instead of trying to cover up this crap.
Oh yeah - and piss off the media - that helps your case too.
Per the cease and desist order, it appears that the lawyers on behalf of Kraupthing are doing their job.
The laws themselves appear to be there to protect the client's confidential information. Paraphrasing (IANAL, IANAL, IANAL!) they are:
58. Banks are not suppose to disclose their customer's financial information.
59. Exception #1 - if there is a risk to a parent company
60. Exception #2 - if the customer(s) say it is okay to disclose the information.
So basically the bank and the bank lawyers are doing the job they are legally obligated to do on behalf of their customers.
If it was a bunch of lies, then the bank officials would have pointed that out.
And when a guy stands in the driveway of a GM plant screaming that alien technology is being used to make Corvettes, does that mean it's true because GM refuses to answer questions from him or reporters and then kicks him off the property? Of course not.
First off, I didn't say the claims were lies. I said there was no explanation or analysis, and thus no way for me to verify them. There isn't even any explanation as to why they believe the documents are authentic. I was lamenting, in general, at the lack of explanations and analysis of documents posted to Wikileaks as a whole. Putting down a list of companies and calling it "analysis" isn't.
Second, it does not logically follow that if someone doesn't deny something, it is true- in part or whole. 5th Amendment, anyone? Same goes for trying to get something out of the public spotlight. Maybe the whole reason they want to suppress it is because it IS bullshit, and letting it spread would make it difficult or impossible to find impartial jurors in a criminal or civil trial- or harm existing companies that have done legitimate business with them.
Lastly, very often a public relations effort involves not even acknowledging claims, regardless of their merit. There are a variety of reasons why. For example: sometimes the claims are bullshit but you don't feel you can convince the public otherwise. Sometimes you want to keep a low profile and hope people will get bored and move on to shinier news items. Sometimes you cannot say anything because of pending legal action- either because it would be risky to comment, or you've been told not to.
But hey, feel free to play out the simple Hollywood conspiracy movie plot. The world is rarely that simple.
Please help metamoderate.
>>>"Iceland" == "Ireland" False
Iceland's sheep == shaggy
Ireland's sheep == shagged
http://www.dattaway.net/images/kaupthing-bank-before-crash-2008.pdf
That was Ireland, sometimes called "the green island", which should not be confused with Greenland, though, as Greenland is more like Iceland than Ireland. I hope you're less confused now.
Ezekiel 23:20
Especially if it describes how the country's currency became worthless.
Just because you are in ICEland doesn't mean you can freeze the free flow of information.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Of course they are trying to censorship this. They have been hard at work since the bank crash trying to hide all the stuff that can show the illigal stuff they where doing. And this was not the only bank of the 3 that went down that had very questionable (amounts over what was legal) loans to insiders.
It was 500 billion in Icelandic currency (krona), not 500 billion euro or USD.
According to xe.com:
500,000,000,000.00 ISK = 3,904,722,881.3900 USD
However, the wikileaks summary says "45 million to 1250 million euros". I haven't read the post that the GP links, except to check the currency type, to find out where it gets the 500 billion number.
The blog posting contains numbers on the order of 300 billion, not 500 billion -- and those are Icelandic crowns (ISK), not euros or dollars. That puts the total at about 2.3 billion U.S. dollars.
Given that Iceland's population is only about 320 thousand people that's still a pretty massive hit to their economy (call it 7000 USD per capita), but not totally implausible (particularly for a heavily leveraged state-controlled bank).
~Idarubicin
Mod parent up! Although, I think the grandparent may have been sarcastic? It's not obvious if so.
Censorship is almost always *officially* about national security, but 99.9% of the time they're actually trying to suppress information which is embarassing or damaging to some particular junta.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
... and mutes, too
This is the exact reason why whistleblower laws exist: to prevent people from being sued for exposing ethics violations.
"I'm in charge of the nation and it affects MY job security.... so 'national security' applies!"
I'm an American so this rule doesn't apply (national security is a euphemism for "because I said so, that's why; questioning the HSA is Counterfreedomary!")...but given the history of the sort of people who censor WikiLeaks I have to question whether or not I trust anyone who does.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
You know, it's really refreshing to see a story about censorship and (presumed) government corruption that's *not* about America for once. Go Iceland! :)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
to be fair, neither is a news article, or at least should be
I wouldn't be so sure of that. Most people in the US can barely contain their rage about the AIG bailout.
From any practical standpoint, you're quite wrong. I just spent a couple of hours going through the massive FOIA disclosure of the Air Force's internal emails dealing with the aftermath of the Air Force One flyby of the Statue of Liberty back in April. Much of the 553-page document is concerned with detailed observations of bloggers' reactions, even to the point of discussing the rate of change in "tweets per minute" criticizing the White House and USAF.
The US government, at least, takes amateur online journalism very seriously. It's safe to say other governments do as well.
That makes them a "proper source."
The super rich stole from all of us and then used their government connections to force us all to pay for their prolifigate spending.
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
There MUST be something in law that a confidentiality or non-disclosure agreement cannot compel you to hide crimes or evidence of it... otherwise the mafia is in good shape.
This space available.
In this context, it is important to distinguish between the "State" and the "Government." If you were arrested for drunk driving by an ordinary policeman, you would hardly say that the Government was arresting you.
Yeah, unless, of course, it's the blogs that break a story.
Like Monica Lewinsky, Dan Rather's Memogate, the doctored Reuters pictures of bombings in Lebanon, the firing of U.S. prosecutors, "Macaca", etc. etc.
Face it, the relationship between bloggers and the mainstream media is not parasitic anymore, it's symbiotic.
It's true, most blogs (including my twitter feed) contain only marginally useful information, if at all. But so do most newspaper articles or TV shows, that merely recite the stuff fed to them by corporations and governments.
Good investigative journalists are a rare kind. Some of them blog.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
Your nation's not secure if everyone's laughing at your leaders, especially if those laughing are thinking "With buffoons like that coordinating their defense, let's invade!"
Consider yourself warned, Iceland.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
There are viable alternatives, temporary as they may be...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
This is the exact reason why whistleblower laws exist: to prevent people from being sued for exposing ethics violations.
You can say that again, whistleblower laws are there for a reason but there must also be due process. The allegation in this case is that the owners of Kaupthing bank effectively loaned them selves and connected parties, specifically the owners of a local company named Exista, ISK 500.000.000.000 which at the time would have been the equivalent of about c.a $6 billion. This money was loaned to shell companies in Holland and the tax haven of Tortola, allegedly in order to pump up the share prices of Kaupthing and Exista in a desperate and deluded bid to postpone the inevitable collapse of the bank. _IF_ these allegations turn out to be true (and personally I'll wait until the prosecutor has finished investigating this before I make up my mind) Kaupthing's management and it's owners and their business partners practically robbed their own bank and used the proceeds to commit massive market manipulation offences.
You have to remember that in Iceland there is still a lot of anger against the people who are perceived to have caused the banking collapse with US style "free-market fundamentalism" and the the news media does have a tendency to surf on waves of public anger. When the Icelandic banks collapsed and all the puss started flowing out of the wounds of the dying banks the Icelandic people ringed the parliament building and pelted it with yoghurt cans, eggs and vegetables. That may not seem like much to somebody in the US or UK but it is a remarkable event for a nation that hasn't seen a really major public protest since a grand punch-up between communists and police in 1949 over the parliament's decision to join NATO. This injunction is probably more of a knee jerk reaction born out of fear of even more public unrest than anything else. I was and still am surprised that neither the US nor UK citizenry turned out in force to egg their parliament buildings after the humongous bailouts in those countries. The UK citizenry in particular has proven to be remarkably docile considering that it is Gordon Brown who is to blame more than most others for the policies that led to the banking mess in that country. Given the amount of taxpayer money he has handed out to fat-cats in the banking system you'd think Britons would be lining up to tar and feather him.
I think you're both confusing all the geographically challenged Americans quite terribly
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.
Here are the MD5 checksums I calculated for various downloads:
The difference impacts the rendering of the document beginning on page 16. It appears to have HTTP headers inserted into the file. The same difference is seen across these download programs: firefox, lynx, wget. There may be a bad replication to that site. Maybe they used a bad HTTP client.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
True: the population of Iceland about the same number as the student enrolment at the University of Buenos Aires.
Anybody want a peanut?
Iceland was under "custody" shortly after the Nazis invaded Denmark during WW2, until the chose to become independent.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Americans are just conditioned to be politically angry: they're like trained monkeys, throw-in 'corporation' and they become a ravenous mob--probably too glib to realize that any non-individual entity recognized by the government is basically a corporation: corporations are not evil, they can be evil, or they can be otherwise: but nuspeak has conditioned so many to associate them with being so. AIG was living-up to legal obligations: they could have done that, or gotten sued and payed even more: and it was the very top ordering-down to put the dang 'loophole' (i.e. it wasn't a loophole) in there in the first place. But one can expect Americans to be outraged: it's like they know they have a part to play in a giant, pretensious, stage in a giant, fake, show. And they are fake. Signed, An American.
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
It's worth noting that the bailouts for banks became necessary due to the government (ahem, the current ruling party in fact, ahem) ordering them through legislation to give high risk loans for houses; those kinds of loans are meant for enterprise, i.e. starting businesses, not for buying personal houses; they decided to examine loan records and from it they 'felt' there was a disproportionately small representation of loans to certain demographics, particularly minorities (i.e. potential voters), and forced a percentage of loans to be so made, as well as set-up quasiprivate (federal) lending-control institutions that conveniently fed money back into their own campaign covers; the catastrophe arising from 'bank' mismanagement was congresses fault, particularly the firggin' dems who decided force loans to be made to those who's financial data demonstrated they couldn't afford the loans, and the institutions they set-up to route more money to that cause. The global 'crisis' was set-off by the fact that the mortgages that were in those (rather BRILLIANT) packages, each consisting of potentially thousands to millions of little slices of mortgages to probabilistically reduce risk, were of this sub-prime type; to top it off they all (both parties) decided to over-relax lending regulations to encourage this market even more, such that an entire industry just to carry out their wishes (and make a lot of dough) popped-up. The traditional banks aren't typically into this sort of thing, yet they had no choice about it: they had a gun to their heads. There was one bank, strangely, that's now rather notable because of this, that somehow did resist, did not get murdered by the fairness-police pretending to play government for it, and they're now in a perky and grand situation. I've forgotten the name, incidentally, and if anybody here recognizes it (or that of a similar institution similar), let me know.
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
"Joe, get my picture out of there" ... "That's like trying to get pee out of a swimming pool."
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Iceland is a close-knit society. The anger there is fueled by a sense of betrayal that people from big heterogeneous countries can't fully appreciate.
New Zealand is also a small country and the fact that we all know each helps keep everyone honest. Many of us are only one or two steps removed from anyone in power, so abuses of power seem to be kept under control. Rich politicians can't deny poverty, because usually there are multiple people in their extended family getting welfare support.
I think the fraudsters will be dealt with - because in Iceland people can actually personally do something to affect the fraudsters - unlike a larger country where action is usually impotent.
Happy moony
So close-knit in fact that I know some of the current ministers, and they all oppose this line of action by the current CEO of Kaupthing, and my prediction is that he has maybe 2-3 months left in office. They will let this slide, then find some other reason to let him go. He's totally done for. This man is exceptionally stupid to think that he can stop Wikileaks from making the information available. The only defence he can possibly have, is if he was legally bound to try to stop it. Which is probably not the case, but it's coming up in court in Iceland this week. They got the ban for one week, and have to make a pretty strong case if they are going to upheld it.
I don't think it will happen.
Some people predict a revelution in Iceland if that happens.
I won't go so far as to call it a revolution, but hit will fhit the san.
Exception Duck - may or may not contain chicken.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drudge_Report#Monica_Lewinsky_scandal
I love how the Icelandics had the audacity to blame the British for the collapse of their banks..
The Mafia is more responsible with how it spends its money.
Redundancy is good And also good.