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Wikileaks Now Hosted By the Swedish Pirate Party
oskii writes "During his visit to the the Swedish capital Stockholm, Wikileaks spokesman Julian Assange has struck a deal with the local Pirate Party. The party, which participates in the national elections next month, will host several new Wikileaks servers to protect freedom of press and help the whistleblower site to carry out its operation."
While it's a nice publicity stunt for the Pirate Party (with the Swedish elections coming up in little more than a month), WikiLeaks may also gain from it. Swedish politicians may well be pressured by the US government, or by others depending on what WikiLeaks publishes in the future, to close down those servers like they did with The Pirate Bay. But now that they are hosted by the Pirate Party that would be seen as a direct attack on a political opponent, with the obvious effects on public opinion. That will likely make them think twice before ordering a shutdown, which probably wasn't the case with The Pirate Bay.
And yes, government representatives giving direct orders to police and prosecutors is illegal in Sweden. But in practice it happens all the time due to widespread patronage and cronyism and few legal checks against it.
Looks like the RIAA finally got that army of copyright enforcers they've been looking for.
I feel so bad for Bradley Manning, the 22 year old that is taking the shit for all of this. Some douchebag congressman wanted to execute him. Why is getting truth out so bad guys?
By "go wrong" do you mean "embarrass the hell out of the US military"?
There is a war going on for your mind.
Sure, because Faux News is held so terribly accountable whenever they get something wrong.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Why would anyone ever have to be held accountable for telling the truth?
That's completely irrelevant. We're talking about politics, here. Conflation is the order of the day. The Piratbyran have associated themselves with an organization that every government hates. Talking heads will brand them security risks, and their agenda will be completely torpedoed.
he also needs to be held accountable if things go wrong
That is an empty, meaningless phrase. What do "held accountable" and "things go wrong" mean? What applicable law covers it? Is the Pentagon "held accountable" when "things go wrong" and Afghan citizens die like chickens? Or when friendly fire kills US and NATO troops?
If you don't want things to "go wrong," pressure your elected representatives to withdraw our forces from the profoundly corrupt interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Don't shit on the very people who are trying to expose the scammers and the war criminals.
Correct. It would be much easier for a foreign government (lets say the U.S), to pressure ISPs within its borders to prevent access to the website and/or persecute those who host leaked information within their borders. That's not necessarily easy or without political repercussion, however, and would probably draw some negative press coverage. Given the sometimes inexorable spread of information, if the Pirate Party were to become elected within the Swedish Parliament, then it would ensure that most of the information on Wikileaks would be available in some form or another, even if foreign governments succeeded in the aforementioned pressure efforts - as long as they remained elected.
Wikileaks is free to publish anything.
If their actions result in deaths, there is due process. Wikileaks employees are charged, tried, and convicted of accessory to murder. See you back in the streets in 2070 or whenever.
They know what they are getting into. Alternatively, if not, well then, stupidity has its price.
You mean media whore....
.. he gets upset when he isn't getting enough attention.
A whistle blower would go through the data and make a something that at least resembles a case. He doesn't want to do any real work, like analyze the data, strip out names to protect innocent parties, or provide only truly relevant data. Instead, he prefers to vomit data and let other people make sense of it.
Assange suffers from attention deficit disorder
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Sorry, you must be new here.
The truth is not nearly as important as their truth, or my truth, as told to me, by me (and others).
Beyond self-deception, there are many who are drawn to the idea of being a sort of "information royalty." The idea that you know more than others, and deserve to know more, because you're special, is very attractive.
Then there's the reality of tactical and strategic advantages. Sometimes you're just better off knowing more than others (information asymmetry), and sometimes you're just better off with others dead. It's a matter of personal assessment. I'm not talking about morality here, just power. For most of us, killing someone else would be something that we would at least say is unthinkable. For some of us, punishing someone for telling the truth would be in the same boat. Both of these proportions may be significantly smaller than you or I would hope.
It's obvious to me that by aligning with a particular political party, Wikileaks is publicly announcing the abandonment of any semblance of editorial neutrality. Their Noble effort to bring additional transparency to the world is now forever tainted.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
For the same reasons we have to have laws restricting the dissemination of top secret truths. Some truth-tellings result in people dying.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Now that we're on the subject, could you please cite credible reports showing that wikileaks did in fact result in "putting specific innocent people at greater risk?" I'm not nearly as interested in spin and rhetoric from politicians and the commercial news media.
It's more just falling in line with the party, and offering another level of protection for the site.
The reason that Sweden's Pirate Party got political support in the first place was because Americans pushed political pressure on the Swedish government to take action, thus causing the first raid on The Pirate Bay. When the public got wind of this, there was massive public outcry saying that they shouldn't allow American corporate interests (and American copyright law) dictate what the Swedish government did. So all of a sudden there was a ton of political support for people that opposed American-style copyright.
This is a political move not to equate wikileaks to the Pirate Party, but instead to show that the Pirate Party operates as a safe haven for information so it cannot be tampered with by foreign interests (most notably, the American government and American corporations, who seem to believe that they are the authorities to determine what copyright law SHOULD be rather than the constituents of these so-called democracies).
This just falls in line with what the party represents. I think that the Swedish people would sooner resent America for trying to impose its beliefs on their democratically elected governments than they would be worried of the consequences of staving those companies off. It's not like America is about to bomb them because they run filesharing sites. And if they did, then Sweden would have an entire international body of allies who would object.
Karma: Non-Heinous
If causing the deaths of NATO forces in Afghanistan is a crime, why hasn't anyone tried to prosecute Bush, Cheney, or Rumsfeld?
Side note: The CAPTCHA for my first attempt to posting this was "invasion".
So would you like to offer up the truth of your home address and some times when your family will be home alone?
There are truths that people shouldn't have to be prepared to defend their lives against, and there is no perfect security system.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
First, it's Cheney. Second, it was Armitage and Novak.
Clearly, he means that if anyone dies in Afghanistan, it's Assange's fault.
Youve got it wrong. The Afghan informants blood is on US military that does an half assed job of protecting their informants. Do you seriously beleive this is the only leak of this and other sensitive information? Spies didnt suddenly become unemployed last month you know.
HTTP/1.1 400
**IT DOES NOT MATTER** what he "leaked"
You heard it here first people: if bsDaemon came across documents that showed the US Military was shoveling terrorist suspects into ovens, he'd ignore it and continue to do his job. Or maybe not that... maybe if he came across documents showing that we were burning women and children to death with phosphorous weapons, he'd just ignore it and continue to do his job. Okay, maybe not that...
Of course the line is drawn somewhere. To pretend otherwise is ***FUCKING INHUMAN*** and a good way to end up doing a lot of evil shit for the paltry reward of state loyalty.
The Pirate Party believes that websites like The Pirate Bay and Wikileaks are legal and should remain up. Since they have the power to act on those beliefs directly (while also trying to change and/or clarify the laws to ensure their legality) they have chosen to do so by hosting the sites in such a way that it is almost impossible for them to be taken down. They are simply standing up for their beliefs in a very public and open way, it doesn't necessarily mean that they support the actually things these sites do. Imagine a police officer doing his duty to protect a KKK member from a violent mob, it hardly means that the police officer supports the KKK.
Please do. If you find any Swedish secrets we would sure want to know.
Some thing we would like to know about is:
*) What did happen in the government during the tsunami in Thailand? Why do we need to keep these e-mails secret for 50 years?
*) What did happen to Raul Wallenberg?
*) Why is a big part of the Palme murder still classified?
*) Why can't we all see the old Stasi files handed over from Germany?
*) Did we really had submarines here during the cold war and where they US or Soviet?
The U.S. government has been leaking classified information of other countries for over hundred years. Make sure there isn't blood on your knuckles before you accuse someone of assault buddy.
http://wwww.zerospeaks.com
the Afghan informants' blood is on your hands now!
More then 30.000 civilians, many of them kids, died in Afghanistan and many more are seriously wounded since the beginning of occupation. If anybody could handle THAT blood on his hands, Swedes will handle their tiny part you mentioned quite comfortably, I guess.
839*929
The attitude is not "I can do illegal stuff in your country because I'm not there" - the extradition treaties between Sweden and USA work just fine for such criminals.
The attitude is that "The stuff is not illegal, even if some other government has sold out and outlawed it." Swedish government and Swedish people have absolute sovereign rights to decide that doing X in their country is completely legal.
(Unless they have also voluntarily made an international treaty saying that they will do otherwise. Then they would be contradicting themselves and the treaty would be overriding. But in this or piratebay case no such obligations prevent Sweden from going whatever way they wish)
it just sounds a little bit like democracy to me
beware he who denies you access to information for in his mind, he already deems himself to be your master (SMAC-ish)