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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.
By "go wrong" do you mean "embarrass the hell out of the US military"?
There is a war going on for your mind.
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.
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.
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.
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?
He isn't a "whistle blower" by any means... he is simply providing a service FOR whistle blowers to anonymously release their information to the world.
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
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.
If you take a quick gander at The Pirate Party you soon discover they are very nicely aligned with free speech activists all over the world. Their only goal is free flow of information without restrictions.
I guess if you consider free speech a bad thing it may be a sad day, join the complaint department along with china, north korea and the rest of the fine states agains free speech.
HTTP/1.1 400
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!
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?
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.
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)