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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."
The Pirate Party is a separate deal from The Pirate Bay. Essentially, the Pirate Part is an organization that pushes for the legality of sites like The Pirate Bay, but they do not go distributing torrents themselves.
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.
No. Not more so than any other organisation. And any legal attack would have to go through the Swedish legal system. There is no "international law", there are just treaties that countries implement in their own legislation.
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
Well they are not one in the same sure, but The Swedish Pirate Party also hosts The Pirate Bay itself so you can't completely separate them from each other either. The Pirate Party Becomes The Pirate Bay’s New Host
Obviously both sites and the Swedish Pirate Party are betting (pretty hard) on the election next month which a successful outcome would as previously posted put TPB and perhaps now wikileaks inside the Swedish Parliament.
Why would anyone ever have to be held accountable for telling the truth?
If I recall correctly, in Sweden the servers of political parties, served from their political offices, are immune to prosecution for a variety of offenses. It's intended to protect the freedom of independent parties. It just adds another layer of shielding on top of Sweden's other protections.
They would have no more political obligation to remove the material in response to an outside government's request than the Republican party in the U.S. would in response to a request from the Chinese government to remove documents from a GOP server.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Sure, as long as he's in line behind all the people who did wrong and covered it up, only to be exposed later through Wikileaks.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
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.
Because he violated operational security which lead to the two charges filed against him.
Misconduct charges were brought against him for "transferring classified data onto his personal computer and adding unauthorized software to a classified computer system" and "communicating, transmitting and delivering national defense information to an unauthorized source".
Both are violations of the UCMJ.
When he became a soldier in the US Army he performed this oath
"I, (NAME), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God."
So he disobeyed the orders of the officers appointed over him and violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice, why shouldn't his ass be sitting in a cell?
Because he violated his orders and actively breached security protocol. **IT DOES NOT MATTER** what he "leaked" or why, it just matters that he broke the law. And in breaking the law by providing classified (even if most of the content was "common knowledge") documents to the 'public', he also provided classified documents to the enemy, in this case the Taliban. And those documents contained the names of Afghan citizens who were "collaborating" with NATO. And that puts them in danger, and makes putting them in danger a lot easier for the Taliban.
You could say that he aided the Taliban. Sounds like about half of "giving aid and comfort" or "aiding and abetting". No, where have I seen that phrase before? Oh, yeah... the definition of treason. And last I checked, treason is a hanging crime. Not only that, but the very center of hell is reserved for traitors, turncoats and informers. So, assuming hell exists and it is as Dante wrote, then he'll likely have some time to discuss the morality of his actions with the people he outed to the Taliban who were subsequently offed.
At least, that's probably what the congressman in question was thinking.
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.
You mean like the U.S. has agreed to be held accountable? Or does the law only apply to other countries?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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
Basically there's two possibilities:
1) Bradley Manning chose to leak the documents, knowing that he would be punished for the leak. In this case I can't feel sorry for him -- he knew what the consequences would be and made a choice. That's his right as an adult.
2) Bradley Manning was dumb enough to think that releasing the documents, which pretty well narrow down who and where he, the leaker, could be, under the alias 'bradass87' rendered him anonymous, and the U.S. government would never figure out who he was. In this case I can't feel sorry for him because it would mean he's one of the stupidest people alive.
So, either way I don't feel bad for him.
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
Now we have someone to bomb! /kidding
Well... /halfkidding
By aligning itself with a political movement, we now have a political entity of a foreign state aiding and abetting our enemies. I don't think we're going to be invading Sweden any time soon, but now we have someone to yell at when people are killed thanks to this info getting leaked out. Heckuvajob, Swedes... the Afghan informants' blood is on your hands now!
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
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
How can you "hide" behind freedom of the press? Do you only consider "press" to be the corporate propaganda mass-media drivel fed to you by Fox and Friends? If anything, Assange is much more of a reporter than anyone in the US media. He takes information, and he disseminates it freely to the public, without modifying it (except for removing names and the like). That's much more in line with what the "press" should be than the constant editorializing you get from Glenn Beck. We live in an open society (or rather, we purport to...), and with that comes danger. We claim to hold ourselves to a higher standard than the rest of the world, but then cover up our actions by burying them under the cloak of "National Security".
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
**IT DOES NOT MATTER** what he "leaked" or why, it just matters that he broke the law.
Geeze, get a grip! Of course it matters. I don't mean to Godwin this thread, but I just talked to my father about this sort of thing yesterday, and he brought up the example of people hiding Jews in their basements etc. during the nazi era in Germany. Imagine someone back then said the same thing:
**IT DOES NOT MATTER** why he hid those Jews from the nazis, it just matters that he broke the law.
Seriously, I don't think this needs any further comment.
The U.S. is prepared to take out Assange and Wikileaks by force. Putting this material on Swedish government property would make Sweden their enemy.
"I, (NAME), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic;..."
Its perhaps ironic that the only credible threats to the constitution reside near the top of the chain of command. Terrorists have never threatened our constitution. A succession of American senators, congressmen, and presidents have done all the damage.
"So he disobeyed the orders of the officers appointed over him and violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice, why shouldn't his ass be sitting in a cell?"
No good deed goes unpunished.
First, it's Cheney. Second, it was Armitage and Novak.
Clearly, he means that if anyone dies in Afghanistan, it's Assange's fault.
**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 isn't a part of the Swedish government. They are not even a party in the parliament.
I would be very interesting to see an American military assault on Sweden however. Would you bomb Stockholm or make an amphibious landing? How would that look? The only remaining superpower beats up a democratic country with 9 million citizens.... Should the Swedish Afghanistan force start firing on their US allies as retaliation?
I don't think you're allowed to call your opinion "humble" when its calling for anyone who's ever committed treason to be shot. Should Schindler have been shot? The thousands of families that hid Jews? The Quakers who ferried slaves to freedom? Oh wait, I guess we don't need to shoot THOSE people because God's on our side, right?
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
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!
I wish the 'Pirate Party' would stop calling itself that. Piracy is seriously wrong - there's nothing glamorous about it. By equating song and movie downloading with piracy, they surrender the argument to those who say they're a bunch of thieves.
And wikileaks should have been more careful about what they leaked. Their sloppiness doesn't help the cause of peace, freedom, or justice either.
Now that the pirates and leakers have combined forces, the mud on one will stick to to the other. Aside from the heightened press attention for the pirate party, I can't see how that's good. And the heightened press attention will be bad if the real message doesn't get out.
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.
Because he's in the military. If an order is unlawful, he has a duty to disobey it. But, he'd better be right that the order, in this case, following operational security, is unlawful. He will have his day in court. If that order is found to not have been unlawful, he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
IMO, it's not really for a 22 yr old E-4 to go about deciding which information should truly be secret and which shouldn't. That decision is way above his pay grade and a lot more than 1 guy decides what is secret and what isn't. If Manning didn't want to be in the Army and do wtf he's told, he shouldn't have joined.
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?
**IT DOES NOT MATTER** what he "leaked" or why, it just matters that he broke the law.
Some people think that he broke the law. Some people think that he didn't. What matters is whether he is charged and convicted in a court of law. He may deny that he was the source of the leak. There may be insufficient evidence for a guilty verdict. He may admit to being the source of the leak, but be able to argue that the classification of the material itself violated Executive Order 13292 (Sec 1.7) ("in no case shall information be classified in order to conceal violations of law").
There have been similar precedents of not prosecuting or convicting whistleblowers. Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, and stated that the documents "demonstrated unconstitutional behavior by a succession of presidents, the violation of their oath and the violation of the oath of every one of their subordinates". "Deepthroat" leaked the details of Watergate to the press and was never prosecuted.
Hypothetically, if Obama were ordering intelligence operatives to wiretap every American citizen, would leaking this information be a crime of treason, punishable by death? How about publishing it?
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
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. ~
The system that Manning "hurt" through his actions is the same system that is punishing him. How is that even remotely comparable to the Nazis and hiding Jews? According to Nazi law, hiding Jews is an act which draws consequence. It wouldn't be surprising if the perpetrators were executed by that system for those high crimes. It isn't surprising, then, that this system is doing what its own code dictates. That doesn't make his court-marshal "right", per se, but seeing as he broke the laws of the system, IT DOES NOT MATTER if it's "right" or "wrong," The system's reaction must be to punish him under its own law.
Life is rarely fair. Cherish the moments when there is a right answer.
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.
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)
So explain to me then how Dick Cheny and Robert Novak conspired to "leak" the name of a CIA operative that was actively engaged in operations, compromised her and everyone she had contact with, but that wasn't treason?
It wasn't Dick Cheney that out'ed Valerie Plame to Robert Novak.
It was Richard Armitrage, US Deputy Secretary of State. Robert Novak identified his source very early in the investigation, so Patrick Fitzgerald knew who it was. Yet, he was able to convict "Scooter" Libby on charges of lying under oath. Ironically, those falsehoods concerned when Libby learned that Plame was a CIA agent, not whether he told anyone else.
While Novak would not be subject to the laws concerning publication of classified information, Armitage was --- and at this date, he has not been prosecuted.
Ask the administration. But they're not secret for 50 years, they're temporarily sealed for 3 (now 2) years pending investigation on whether the law should be changed re: backup copies. I don't think it's going to happen in the end.
By Soviet accounts, he was executed in Lubyanka prison in 1947.
Because it remains an active police investigation.
You know, Sweden used to be a mighty and warlike empire who dominated Northern Europe for centuries, and that's after they retired from being professional looters known as vikings. Don't underestimate the Swedish; the reason they don't practice the arts of war anymore is that they are so very good at them.
Why do you think even Hitler didn't invade Sweden? And Stalin specifically told his troops to be careful to not violate the Swedish border when he tried to conquer Finland. They were crazy megalomaniacs, but not that crazy. So forget orbital nukes and simply accept that as long as it's in Sweden, Wikileaks could as well be in Mordor - nah, the very Angband itself. And King Gustaf might look like a frail old man, but if you invade Sweden he will pull the Hammer of the Underworld and a horde of dragons from somewhere and go Morgoth on your ass.
Don't mess with Sweden. You have been warned.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.