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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."
Yes, The Pirate Bay was up and running again three days after that raid, and still is, and probably will be for the forseeable future. But the prosecutor _did_ raid their web hosting company, take their computers and dozens of other ones that just happened to be in the same room, and kept them for years, long after the time it could have taken the police to mirror the data. That's what I meant.
TPB had the resources and contacts to enable them to just copy their backups to other computers around the world and get the site running again, and I'm sure that WikiLeaks too have lots of hidden backup servers and hidden backup people to run them. Probably lots more than TPB. That doesn't mean that their enemies in e.g. the Pentagon will not try to close them down, one by one.
An interesting question & answer chat with Julian Assange, who founded WikiLeaks was published (in English) by Dagens Nyheter, the biggest morning newspaper in Sweden, today.
It gives some insight into his thinking as well as the seriousness of their task — two of their contributors have already been assassinated.
Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
Perhaps the US government should bug some Swedish government offices and broadcast all of Sweden's classified information too, instead. Maybe a nice game of tit for tat.
This reminds me of ECHELON. Remember, when US spies on UK citizens (spying on US citizens would be illegal, but spying on foreign ones is okay), UK spies on US citizens, and then they exchange data. What you propose is a similar thing in reverse - Sweden citizens spy on US government and (legally) publish the results from Sweden, US citizens spy on Swedish government and (legally) publish the results from US, and then both know what their respective governments are up to.
Hey, it actually sounds like a good idea! Can you please write a letter to your representative asking them to start spying on other countries and publishing that info ASAP? The sooner they start, the faster they'll get to my country. ~
This is actually a fairly common example used to illustrate that most people's ethics are of the Utilitarian sort as opposed to the Deontological sort -- even those who would describe themselves as adhering to a Deontological type of ethics (i.e. Christians).
Deontological ethics holds a thing is wrong if a rule is violated -- i.e. a lie is told. It is wrong to tell a lie -- period. There is no situational or contextual element in the analysis -- one simply obeys in order to be ethical and if one disobeys one is unethical.
Utilitarian ethics has a strong contextual element which focuses on likely happiness/unhappiness resulting from an action and searches for the maximization of happiness as the ethical end -- the ethical is that which maximizes happiness.
Given the situation above with regard to the Nazis knocking on the door and asking, "Do you have Jews hiding here?" the vast majority of respondents will say the ethical answer is "No" and justify that answer by way of what would happen if they answered truthfully -- the Jews would face horrible suffering and/or death. In short, the maximization of happiness in this case means breaking a rule against lying since adhering to that rule will mean greater suffering.
Most people who are strong adherents to Deontological ethical systems don't see themselves as violating their ethical beliefs in this circumstance, but they most assuredly are doing so. They might think of it as an "exception" or find some other justification, but in the end they are utilizing a competing and antithetical ethical system to the one they purport to adhere to -- they're actually Utilitarians at heart even if they don't recognize themselves as such.
One can be an adherent to an ethical system which is solely rules based ("x" is wrong no matter what), but in doing so one must sanction some truly horrible actions -- like answering "Yes" when the Nazis knock and ask if Jews are hiding in the basement.
Thought thinks itself.