mb writes to mention that Germany has gone one step further in impeding access to Wikileaks. Germany's registration authority, DENIC, recently suspended Wikileaks.de without notice. "The action comes two weeks after the house of the German WikiLeaks domain sponsor, Theodor Reppe, was searched by German authorities. Police documentation shows that the March 24, 2009 raid was triggered by WikiLeaks' publication of Australia's proposed secret internet censorship list. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) told Australian journalists that they did not request the intervention of the German government."
This is why I think we have to wait before we let Turkey join the EU. We've got to clean up our own house first, and the more nations are added that exhibit such behaviour (Turkey for example was somewhat recently in the news for banning richarddawkins.net) the harder the cleansing is going to be.
If you have some stuff on your site, that I don't want people to see, or I plan to do something, that you will somehow find out and post it on your site, and then I shut your domain name down - Censorship. At least a form of it.
Wikileaks.org is the main domain name and has not been shut down. No access to information has been lost, except to the tiny minority of people who were only using wikileaks.de and don't know how to use a search engine.
If you do something we don't like, we come to your home and search every last corner of it. We'll take your domain and publicly link you to child pornography.
Then German law is improper. To say that it is illegal to tell the public what sites have been blocked, indeed, disappeared by another government is beyond fascist. The child pornography gambit has always been a ruse to allow censoring whatever the tyrants don't want us to see.
The reasoning is ever-expanding: child rape -> child sex -> child molestation -> child nudity -> teenage nudity -> clothed children in "arousing" poses -> breast-feeding photos -> clothed teenagers in "arousing" poses -> making photographs -> making drawings -> selling pictures -> sharing pictures -> posting pictures -> downloading pictures -> looking at pictures -> thinking unapproved thoughts about otherwise legal pictures -> linking to sites that have posted pictures -> linking to sites that link to sites that post pictures -> posting which sites are censored by your own government -> posting which sites are censored by other governments -> pointing out that some censored sites are not anarchist-communist-terrorist-liberal-necro-copro-sado-boogyman kiddy porn.
And if a policeman or prosecutor claims that you have gotten too close to doing any of the above, she can take down your whole site, especially the bits that are exposing government criminality, seize the domain name, take all your stuff and lock you up. Now there is no way of knowing what they have censored or redressing the intentional or sloppy misuse of the thoughtcrime statutes by the private companies that implement the secret laws. But - think of the children! It's for the children! Anyone who claims otherwise must be a anarchist-communist-terrorist-liberal-necro-copro-sado-pedophile-boogyman!
How are we supposed to deal with the child-porn problem if we're not allowed to discuss it ? People revert to an apelike mental state the moment you mention pedophilia.
Want to mess with that prick who cut you off on the highway ? Call 911 and tell them you saw him rape a 6 year old, he will be arrested and detained within the hour, and those lovely cops will make sure to tell everyone he's a pedophile before the day is done. Not a single neuron will fire, nobody will dare think about evidence or motive. It's like the term "kiddie porn" is the root password to society, with it you can get anything done to anyone.
If they really want to combat child pornography, they need to attack the source: producers. Hiding links will not make it go away. Revoking domains will not make it go away. Shutting down servers wont' even make it go away. Our beloved Streisand effect ensures that any and all censorship is met with an even greater riposte.
How is just having a website address to a child porn site illegal, if you didn't even visit the link? I wonder how any blacklisting filtering software would be legal in Germany if it filters out illegal content sites.
If I post a link to Nuclear weapons [wikipedia.org] am I going to be charged with being a terrorist? Oh wait, I voted for Ron Paul in the primaries, I probably already am somewhere [wikileaks.org].
.... this is why a decentralized Internet with no intelligence on the switches is important. Because of that, Wikileaks was able to have multiple hosts in multiple countries that are affected by very different sets of laws and busybodies. Even though two major players got together to knock Wikileaks off the Internet, it still is humming along quite nicely.
Folks, fear the day that somebody requests control over who gets to have access to the Internet (Obama, I'm looking at you) and who gets routed where. Yes, QoS is technically going in that direction, but it is still difficult to abuse that for the purpose of knocking random offenders of the Internet. If that somebody happens to be The Government, you can be sure that a) all other governments will want the same control, and b) diplomacy and general government douchbaggery will only leave the blandest, least offensive and best lobbied/bribed sites up and running. Everything else will have moved underground, where again, you'll have to know the right people to get access to the good stuff.
The situation in Germany is insane. Being from Sweden, I've gone on several booze runs to Germany. I speak a very neutral English (along with four other languages), and can easily pull off various accents to the point where I've had people: *) Ask iIf I'm from Edinburgh *) Ask if I'm from England *) Ask if I'm polish *) Ask if I'm australian *) Called me "a fucking New York dick" *) Ask me if I'm Canadian
I've tried talking to germans. I've tried asking ~25 year olds for directions -- you'd expect "the Intern
The classic stuff is when you are a English as a first language person and they simply do not believe anything you tell them. Even simple things like Strassenbahn is a tram in English.
But I don't complain too much, my German is still pretty bad, since I don't get lots of practice. Everyone here speaks ok English.
The law which would allow them to suspend a domain for anything is not yet through our assembly - IF they did this, it's illegal - also the message from the Domain name registrar (DENIC) translates out to
The requested domain is currently not reachable
The domain-owner or the administrative contact should be informed about these problems by now. We expect them to be solved soon.
If you as domain-owner or administrative contact are not yet informed about the hassle, we might not have reached you. In this case, please contact:...
so this MIGHT be a technical problem, though this still highly alarms me, since I am a political activist in germany, myself...
While there is no real loss of access to the information or loss of information itself, the loss of the wikileak.de domain is bad for those who prefer to use it. As has been argued elsewhere in these comments, this is censorship and it is wrong (even if it was accidental or some misunderstanding).
How do we prevent this or restore this? The wikileak system should be more distrubuted. OK, it probably already is pretty distributed, especially when you account for the language- or country-specific domains. However, maybe we can do more? WikiTaxi (http://www.wikitaxi.org/delphi/doku.php/products/wikitaxi/index) is something I just learned about today and it looks quite interesting. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to bring down a P2P version of a wikileak website? I don't know the technical details of how to set it up, but there are a lot of incredibly smart programmers out there who can make it happen.
But, to be honest, I heard the jackboots on concrete as well...
It's scary how many posters here apparently can't tell the difference between (a) censoring a list of links, mainly to child porn, that is, rightly or wrongly, illegal to redistribute in the country concerned; and (b) killing or incarcerating millions based only on racial/religious prejudice. I guess making comparisons with the Nazis because this particular unpopular decision was made in Germany makes a certain type of person feel good. Irony, thy name is Slashdot.
It's scary how many posters here apparently can't tell the difference between (a) censoring a list of links, mainly to child porn, that is, rightly or wrongly, illegal to redistribute in the country concerned; and (b) killing or incarcerating millions based only on racial/religious prejudice.
The Nazis were putting people in prison for political reasons long before they created death camps. There is some historical relevance here, but unfortunately it has grown into a cliche and thus become mundane. In the 1930s people didn't care that it was Jews and homosexuals, and today people don't care that it is pedophiles. We all need something to hate.
And really, it's all bullshit, FUD, lies and propaganda. The "child porn" on these lists isn't that of children being kidnapped and forced to be sex slaves, it is modeling sites and political sites like Wikileaks. The truth shall set you free. Censorship will always subvert the truth.
Mod parent up. It's both sad and dangerous that people have already become so ignorant of history that some think the holocaust was 'based only on racial/religious prejudice'. Like the burning of the Reichstag never happened.
Blocking internet links is not going to solve the child pornography problem. Hunting down and imprisoning the people who make child porn, while a lot more difficult thing to do, and certainly a lot more expensive, is by far the better way to go about it and might actually produce real results.
But this isn't about child pornography. It's about censoring a website which is dedicated to ensuring transparency in government - and yes, that is exactly the sort of thing that leads to the sort of atrocities that you mention. If you had been paying attention to the controversy over the Australian censorship list, you might have understood that and not posted something as ignorant as what you did.
It amazes me that we're only a couple generations removed from WWII, and still have fascist and dictatorship governments all over the world, yet the very things that those governments are condemned for doing are permissible if it's western democracies doing them.
The whole "godwin" thing irritates the hell out of me. Why shouldn't we make comparisons to the nazis (or Stalin or any of the other destructive dictatorships out there, recent or not?) How exactly is it bad to make comparisons to the worst of humanity's behavior over the last century? Is that not how we determine just how to recognize and stop such behavior before it gets a foothold?
It's like another saying that still irritates me (and I'm not hardly young anymore) - "Judge ye not, lest ye be judged." - if we can't exercise judgement of others, then just how the hell are we supposed to solve the problems that evil sonsabitches bring to this world? Random guessing? (Wait, that'd be the US justice system, sorry)... the whole FUCKING CONCEPT OF HUMAN SENTIENCE demands that we judge the environment we live in at all times, including our fellow sentients, in order to survive...
I suspect that particular saying was introduced to human culture by people who *didn't* want the average joe judging their actions, because of what they were doing...
/rant and not sorry for it, flame me, mod me down, whattehfuckever
I'd have a lot more sympathy for Wikileaks if they hadn't hosted a whole load of stuff that really should have remained secret and for good reason.
If what they posted was embarrassing, censoring it would be one thing.
When what they post undermines national security or criminal investigations or is otherwise normally considered privileged information for good reasons, and furthermore they go out of their way to keep contributors (who may well have obtained the information illegally) anonymous, and on top of
Transparency is transparency. List what items have they hosted that you felt shouldn't have been up? I can almost guareentee you that someone out there can give you a reason why they should have been.
OK, here's an ironic one: they posted a list of members of the British National Party.
Now, I don't agree with the BNP's politics, and therefore I don't vote for them, but I also don't support rules that are prejudiced against people purely on account of their membership of a certain political party. Such rules are, IMHO, far more dangerous to the democratic process than anything they are likely to prevent.
Wikileaks, supposedly proud of the way it helps the underdog to fight oppressive governments and the laws they use to silence dissent, outed an entire group of people, and cost several of them their jobs as a result.
If that's not a clear enough case, then let me provide a hypothetical example to go with it. Let's suppose that you, personally, have been wrongfully accused of committing a heinous crime. Your country, having regard for due process, requires you to attend a court case to determine your innocence or guilt.
Let us suppose that, mindful of the rule that one is innocent until proven guilty, the judge orders that your identity not be disclosed by the media until the case has concluded. However, anyone in open court can clearly see that you are there, and perhaps one of those people, knowing how heinous the crime you (might have) committed is, decides to post the case details, including your identity, on Wikileaks.
The following day, you get home from court to find an angry mob waiting outside your home, which has been extensively vandalised because obviously if you're in court then you did something wrong and you deserved it. Think this couldn't happen to you? Try looking up what happened to the paediatrician who looked a bit like a low-res photo of a suspected paedophile that was published in a British newspaper.
Sometimes, there are good reasons to keep things secret, and revealing those things publicly does real damage and has no redeeming value whatsoever. Were this not the case, there would be no need for classifications for official secrets, the law wouldn't allow confidentiality clauses in commercial agreements, people wouldn't care about privacy, no-one would have invented data protection laws... Any organisation that makes no attempt to distinguish legitimate cases where secrecy should be respected and repeats any information given to it no matter the implications is a danger to society, and I have no qualms whatsoever about squishing them with any laws and/or firearms that come to hand. That is, after all, no worse than the fate that such an organisation will inevitably inflict on someone innocent, sooner or later.
Everyone knows that if you get arrested then you must have done something wrong. Well, maybe not everyone, but everyone that watches American Idol. Or maybe Survivor. And certainly Survivor-watchers want to see the perp-walk so they know if they ever see someone that looks like that in the grocery store they can avoid them. And keep their kids away.
Come on, it is just like reviewing the sex offender registry and making sure that people that looks like sex offenders are treated like criminals. Or lepers
Arguing the 'essential' nature of secrets with me is not likely a productive experience, which if you peruse my comment history concerning that, would be clear. I'm of the "secrets are a bad thing" camp. The only reason to keep secrets currently is the imbalance of power between those who have the most to hide and those who just think they do. And the only way to overcome that imbalance is to start exposing those at the top and working your way down to the bottom.
Which is why I stated my request as "list the things that you don't think should be up there" rather than "explain to me why secrets should kept"
In regards to your actual example, you will also remember I stated that for any item you listed, someone should be able to come up with a reason for it.
Here is my world view. There may be secrets you'd like to keep about yourself. There may be ideas, fantasies, even events in your life that you don't want shared with the world.
But a political party is by definition a public entity. You are attempting, by your membership, to guide public and government opinion. Your membership to a party should not be a secret. Not in Britain. There are countries in this world where that would be different. But Britain is not one of them. It is not a tyranny. It is not run by a government that is going to go and shove these people into internment camps. The BNP has a history of attempting to play the 'man in the shadows' of attempting to get people into position of authority while hiding their affiliation. This, IMO, is wrong. Even if they weren't the more legitimate sibling of the Nazi's and KKK.
The McCarthy Era of America was a shame specifically because what happened after people were fingered as Communists then was wrong, not because people were outed in the first place.
Most countries don't restrict news about ongoing criminal trials. England and a handful of other countries do declare some cases to be sub judice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub_judice [wikipedia.org] but most don't and get along fine. Indeed, if I were being tried for a crime I'd rather it be made public. More eyes make it less likely that the government can get away with crap. The problem in these cases is that the British have a ridiculous attitude about child porn where once someone is even remotely accused of having
The Wikinews article, originally published on April 19, described material in the Church Handbook of Instructions. The work is a two-volume book of policies and is a guide for leaders of the Mormon Church. Wikinews obtained the Church Handbook of Instructions from Wikileaks, a whistleblower website which publishes anonymous submissions of sensitive documents while preserving the anonymity of its contributors. Wikileaks describes the material as significant because "...the book is strictly confidential among
There is a kind of meta exception to that reasoning.
By being transparent about whistleblowers you decrease the transparency by eliminating the whistleblowers. It is the same reason why being tolerant toward intolerant people isn't really a good idea. Or why you shouldn't really feel a need to respect people that doesn't respect others.
I do agree with your last sentence is good though. There is no reason for wikileaks to hide those providing them with services and other support. That is just the same lack of
In order for anything to appear on Wikileaks its secrecy must already have been compromised. Wikileaks merely makes this fact public. Thus when one of the very few things that should legitimately be kept secret appears there it is evidence that someone is incompetent; not that Wikileaks is irresponsible.
A lot of what he said is illogical and untrue. Wikileaks does fact check, and in fact if what they posted wasn't true then it wouldn't be so controversial, and governments around the world wouldn't be attempting to shut them down. And no they don't post juvenile and second rate stories; a lot of what they publish is of important political and human interest.
Well it seems I've unintentionally replied to the GP in a round-about way.
Compare them to a respectable site like the smoking gun which actually fact checks their material - and as a result has never been successfully sued.
Wikileaks does not get in trouble for things which aren't true (or not solely due to untruths). It's the true things that people make the most fuss about. For example, the leaked Scientology OT documents were verified as genuine by the legal threats made by the COS, which were based on IP law, not defamation.
Compare them to a respectable site like the smoking gun which actually fact checks their material
Because it's much more important that we get to see Gary Busey's drunk-driving mug shot than to find out that a major Western democracy has secret prisons where rendition and torture are practiced.
Are you sure you understand what Wikileaks is all about? It is precisely about getting information that has been concealed from the public out so that knowledge of the truth of the world can be available. Most people live in a pretty strange dream world where there are "good guys" and "bad guys" and some really strange notions that are used to divide the world into factions that intend to kill one another.
As to your allegations of making information available for "identity theft" you are out of your head. There is a bigger problem. No one can steal an identity. What people can do is make others think that they are someone else. That is not "theft." That is fraud. The people being stolen from through the use of fraudulent means are the people who most depend on a system of identification that puts numeric tags on everyone for the purposes of tracking and controlling them. And when someone pretends to be someone else in order to fool someone else into giving them money, goods or services, in what bizarro world is it the "fault" of the person whose identity was forged or mimicked? "Identity theft" is the name given to fraudulent activity to make it seem as though the "victim" is the person whose identity was copied when the actual victims are those who were fooled by the fraudster. All of this is facilitated by these numeric tags and data records that are assigned to people. This system was created to make it easier to track and trust individuals for business purposes and somehow, the burden and the risk of managing such a system whose primary designers and beneficiaries are government and big money institutions has been placed on the shoulders of the individuals.
You might think your identity lies in the numbers and data records assigned to you. If you do, then you have bought into their game hook line and sinker. I don't. Stay out of debt and you will stay off of their system. People can attempt to "steal my identity" all they want, but since I stay out of debt, there is no way I can be harmed. (Yes, I know that increasingly employers and governments are using credit scores to determine if someone can be trusted... what a big dumb idea that is!)
Employers also prefer to hire those with no family who can pledge their soul to the company and nothing else.
It's like they think they buy you when you sign the dotted line for IT jobs these days including scrutinizing many aspects of your personal life that are frankly none of their f**king business. I'm to the point now that I've declined to take urinalysis tests a few times because I'm tired of being treated like a criminal. And yes, I have clean urine.
I've got a job, it doesn't pay well, but I can affo
Just ask yourself what do you expect from a wikipedia spin-off?
That a site uses MediaWiki, and includes Wiki in its name, does not make it a Wikipedia spinoff. MediaWiki is free software, and can be used by anyone, for any purpose, and the word Wiki is not trademarked by the WikiMedia Foundation, and thus, anyone can use that too.
Given there are more than a couple of posts just above you doing some german bashing, might I suggest that posting almost immediately after the article goes up to complain about how there aren't more german bashing comments might seem a bit... hypercritical (and yes, that's the word I meant)?
Damn! (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Is it wrong to call these germans.... (Score:3, Funny)
...friggin' nazi's? Or is that wrong. Very wrong.
This is why EU must fix itself before new members (Score:2, Interesting)
This is why I think we have to wait before we let Turkey join the EU. We've got to clean up our own house first, and the more nations are added that exhibit such behaviour (Turkey for example was somewhat recently in the news for banning richarddawkins.net) the harder the cleansing is going to be.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The EU is first and foremost an economic power, and as such, it wants to expand. Ideals don't matter.
Re:This is why EU must fix itself before new membe (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Is this really censorship? (Score:4, Interesting)
I read about this story on Wikileak's site (http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Germany_muzzles_Wikileaks)
This seems like Germany improperly suspending a domain name, but I don't think they are censoring any information in this move.
Re:Is this really censorship? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you have some stuff on your site, that I don't want people to see, or I plan to do something, that you will somehow find out and post it on your site, and then I shut your domain name down - Censorship.
At least a form of it.
Or am I missing something here ?
Re:Is this really censorship? (Score:5, Informative)
Wikileaks.org is the main domain name and has not been shut down. No access to information has been lost, except to the tiny minority of people who were only using wikileaks.de and don't know how to use a search engine.
It's a very minor form of censorship, but I think this story is a red herring to more important censorship stories like this one
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks#Potential_future_Australian_censorship [wikipedia.org]
Parent
How is this not censorship by intimidation? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you do something we don't like, we come to your home and search every last corner of it. We'll take your domain and publicly link you to child pornography.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
This is not about "improperly" suspending a domain name.
wikileaks posted the australian block-lists which contain links to child-pornography.
Linking or forwarding to such links is illegal in germany.
I think it may have been better to strip links which contained pedophilia or similar things from those lists before publishing them.
Re:Is this really censorship? (Score:5, Interesting)
Then German law is improper. To say that it is illegal to tell the public what sites have been blocked, indeed, disappeared by another government is beyond fascist. The child pornography gambit has always been a ruse to allow censoring whatever the tyrants don't want us to see.
The reasoning is ever-expanding: child rape -> child sex -> child molestation -> child nudity -> teenage nudity -> clothed children in "arousing" poses -> breast-feeding photos -> clothed teenagers in "arousing" poses -> making photographs -> making drawings -> selling pictures -> sharing pictures -> posting pictures -> downloading pictures -> looking at pictures -> thinking unapproved thoughts about otherwise legal pictures -> linking to sites that have posted pictures -> linking to sites that link to sites that post pictures -> posting which sites are censored by your own government -> posting which sites are censored by other governments -> pointing out that some censored sites are not anarchist-communist-terrorist-liberal-necro-copro-sado-boogyman kiddy porn.
And if a policeman or prosecutor claims that you have gotten too close to doing any of the above, she can take down your whole site, especially the bits that are exposing government criminality, seize the domain name, take all your stuff and lock you up. Now there is no way of knowing what they have censored or redressing the intentional or sloppy misuse of the thoughtcrime statutes by the private companies that implement the secret laws. But - think of the children! It's for the children! Anyone who claims otherwise must be a anarchist-communist-terrorist-liberal-necro-copro-sado-pedophile-boogyman!
Parent
Re:Is this really censorship? (Score:5, Insightful)
How are we supposed to deal with the child-porn problem if we're not allowed to discuss it ? People revert to an apelike mental state the moment you mention pedophilia.
Want to mess with that prick who cut you off on the highway ? Call 911 and tell them you saw him rape a 6 year old, he will be arrested and detained within the hour, and those lovely cops will make sure to tell everyone he's a pedophile before the day is done. Not a single neuron will fire, nobody will dare think about evidence or motive. It's like the term "kiddie porn" is the root password to society, with it you can get anything done to anyone.
If they really want to combat child pornography, they need to attack the source: producers. Hiding links will not make it go away. Revoking domains will not make it go away. Shutting down servers wont' even make it go away. Our beloved Streisand effect ensures that any and all censorship is met with an even greater riposte.
Parent
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I'm afraid (literally) that apelike mentality is a permanent feature of the population at large.
Re:Is this really censorship? (Score:4, Insightful)
How is just having a website address to a child porn site illegal, if you didn't even visit the link? I wonder how any blacklisting filtering software would be legal in Germany if it filters out illegal content sites.
If I post a link to Nuclear weapons [wikipedia.org] am I going to be charged with being a terrorist? Oh wait, I voted for Ron Paul in the primaries, I probably already am somewhere [wikileaks.org].
Parent
And.... (Score:5, Insightful)
.... this is why a decentralized Internet with no intelligence on the switches is important. Because of that, Wikileaks was able to have multiple hosts in multiple countries that are affected by very different sets of laws and busybodies. Even though two major players got together to knock Wikileaks off the Internet, it still is humming along quite nicely.
Folks, fear the day that somebody requests control over who gets to have access to the Internet (Obama, I'm looking at you) and who gets routed where. Yes, QoS is technically going in that direction, but it is still difficult to abuse that for the purpose of knocking random offenders of the Internet. If that somebody happens to be The Government, you can be sure that a) all other governments will want the same control, and b) diplomacy and general government douchbaggery will only leave the blandest, least offensive and best lobbied/bribed sites up and running. Everything else will have moved underground, where again, you'll have to know the right people to get access to the good stuff.
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"...you'll have to know the right people to get access to the good stuff."
Hopefully.
If its not ACMA its lobbyists. (Score:5, Insightful)
Lobbying - the 'unofficial' 'democracy'. Shaping societies since stone ages.
work around (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Handful?
The situation in Germany is insane.
Being from Sweden, I've gone on several booze runs to Germany.
I speak a very neutral English (along with four other languages), and can easily pull off various accents to the point where I've had people:
*) Ask iIf I'm from Edinburgh
*) Ask if I'm from England
*) Ask if I'm polish
*) Ask if I'm australian
*) Called me "a fucking New York dick"
*) Ask me if I'm Canadian
I've tried talking to germans.
I've tried asking ~25 year olds for directions -- you'd expect "the Intern
Re:work around (Score:4, Funny)
You are incredibly brave.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
But I don't complain too much, my German is still pretty bad, since I don't get lots of practice. Everyone here speaks ok English.
WAIT A MINUTE! (Score:5, Informative)
so this MIGHT be a technical problem, though this still highly alarms me, since I am a political activist in germany, myself...
Solution (Probably Not Needed) (Score:5, Informative)
While there is no real loss of access to the information or loss of information itself, the loss of the wikileak.de domain is bad for those who prefer to use it. As has been argued elsewhere in these comments, this is censorship and it is wrong (even if it was accidental or some misunderstanding).
How do we prevent this or restore this? The wikileak system should be more distrubuted. OK, it probably already is pretty distributed, especially when you account for the language- or country-specific domains. However, maybe we can do more? WikiTaxi (http://www.wikitaxi.org/delphi/doku.php/products/wikitaxi/index) is something I just learned about today and it looks quite interesting. Can you imagine how difficult it would be to bring down a P2P version of a wikileak website? I don't know the technical details of how to set it up, but there are a lot of incredibly smart programmers out there who can make it happen.
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Wow, 4.
But, to be honest, I heard the jackboots on concrete as well...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
But, to be honest, I heard the jackboots on concrete as well...
It's scary how many posters here apparently can't tell the difference between (a) censoring a list of links, mainly to child porn, that is, rightly or wrongly, illegal to redistribute in the country concerned; and (b) killing or incarcerating millions based only on racial/religious prejudice. I guess making comparisons with the Nazis because this particular unpopular decision was made in Germany makes a certain type of person feel good. Irony, thy name is Slashdot.
Re:Godwin's Law Bait. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's scary how many posters here apparently can't tell the difference between (a) censoring a list of links, mainly to child porn, that is, rightly or wrongly, illegal to redistribute in the country concerned; and (b) killing or incarcerating millions based only on racial/religious prejudice.
The Nazis were putting people in prison for political reasons long before they created death camps. There is some historical relevance here, but unfortunately it has grown into a cliche and thus become mundane. In the 1930s people didn't care that it was Jews and homosexuals, and today people don't care that it is pedophiles. We all need something to hate.
And really, it's all bullshit, FUD, lies and propaganda. The "child porn" on these lists isn't that of children being kidnapped and forced to be sex slaves, it is modeling sites and political sites like Wikileaks. The truth shall set you free. Censorship will always subvert the truth.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Godwin's Law Bait. (Score:5, Insightful)
Blocking internet links is not going to solve the child pornography problem. Hunting down and imprisoning the people who make child porn, while a lot more difficult thing to do, and certainly a lot more expensive, is by far the better way to go about it and might actually produce real results.
But this isn't about child pornography. It's about censoring a website which is dedicated to ensuring transparency in government - and yes, that is exactly the sort of thing that leads to the sort of atrocities that you mention. If you had been paying attention to the controversy over the Australian censorship list, you might have understood that and not posted something as ignorant as what you did.
It amazes me that we're only a couple generations removed from WWII, and still have fascist and dictatorship governments all over the world, yet the very things that those governments are condemned for doing are permissible if it's western democracies doing them.
The whole "godwin" thing irritates the hell out of me. Why shouldn't we make comparisons to the nazis (or Stalin or any of the other destructive dictatorships out there, recent or not?) How exactly is it bad to make comparisons to the worst of humanity's behavior over the last century? Is that not how we determine just how to recognize and stop such behavior before it gets a foothold?
It's like another saying that still irritates me (and I'm not hardly young anymore) - "Judge ye not, lest ye be judged." - if we can't exercise judgement of others, then just how the hell are we supposed to solve the problems that evil sonsabitches bring to this world? Random guessing? (Wait, that'd be the US justice system, sorry)... the whole FUCKING CONCEPT OF HUMAN SENTIENCE demands that we judge the environment we live in at all times, including our fellow sentients, in order to survive...
I suspect that particular saying was introduced to human culture by people who *didn't* want the average joe judging their actions, because of what they were doing...
SB
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Re:Godwin's Law Bait. (Score:5, Funny)
Between the years of 1940 and 1945, the were no active .de domain names.
Coincidence? I think not.
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Yeah, right (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd have a lot more sympathy for Wikileaks if they hadn't hosted a whole load of stuff that really should have remained secret and for good reason.
If what they posted was embarrassing, censoring it would be one thing.
When what they post undermines national security or criminal investigations or is otherwise normally considered privileged information for good reasons, and furthermore they go out of their way to keep contributors (who may well have obtained the information illegally) anonymous, and on top of
Re:Yeah, right (Score:5, Insightful)
Transparency is transparency. List what items have they hosted that you felt shouldn't have been up? I can almost guareentee you that someone out there can give you a reason why they should have been.
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Re:Yeah, right (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, here's an ironic one: they posted a list of members of the British National Party.
Now, I don't agree with the BNP's politics, and therefore I don't vote for them, but I also don't support rules that are prejudiced against people purely on account of their membership of a certain political party. Such rules are, IMHO, far more dangerous to the democratic process than anything they are likely to prevent.
Wikileaks, supposedly proud of the way it helps the underdog to fight oppressive governments and the laws they use to silence dissent, outed an entire group of people, and cost several of them their jobs as a result.
If that's not a clear enough case, then let me provide a hypothetical example to go with it. Let's suppose that you, personally, have been wrongfully accused of committing a heinous crime. Your country, having regard for due process, requires you to attend a court case to determine your innocence or guilt.
Let us suppose that, mindful of the rule that one is innocent until proven guilty, the judge orders that your identity not be disclosed by the media until the case has concluded. However, anyone in open court can clearly see that you are there, and perhaps one of those people, knowing how heinous the crime you (might have) committed is, decides to post the case details, including your identity, on Wikileaks.
The following day, you get home from court to find an angry mob waiting outside your home, which has been extensively vandalised because obviously if you're in court then you did something wrong and you deserved it. Think this couldn't happen to you? Try looking up what happened to the paediatrician who looked a bit like a low-res photo of a suspected paedophile that was published in a British newspaper.
Sometimes, there are good reasons to keep things secret, and revealing those things publicly does real damage and has no redeeming value whatsoever. Were this not the case, there would be no need for classifications for official secrets, the law wouldn't allow confidentiality clauses in commercial agreements, people wouldn't care about privacy, no-one would have invented data protection laws... Any organisation that makes no attempt to distinguish legitimate cases where secrecy should be respected and repeats any information given to it no matter the implications is a danger to society, and I have no qualms whatsoever about squishing them with any laws and/or firearms that come to hand. That is, after all, no worse than the fate that such an organisation will inevitably inflict on someone innocent, sooner or later.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Everyone knows that if you get arrested then you must have done something wrong. Well, maybe not everyone, but everyone that watches American Idol. Or maybe Survivor. And certainly Survivor-watchers want to see the perp-walk so they know if they ever see someone that looks like that in the grocery store they can avoid them. And keep their kids away.
Come on, it is just like reviewing the sex offender registry and making sure that people that looks like sex offenders are treated like criminals. Or lepers
Re:Yeah, right (Score:4, Insightful)
Arguing the 'essential' nature of secrets with me is not likely a productive experience, which if you peruse my comment history concerning that, would be clear. I'm of the "secrets are a bad thing" camp. The only reason to keep secrets currently is the imbalance of power between those who have the most to hide and those who just think they do. And the only way to overcome that imbalance is to start exposing those at the top and working your way down to the bottom.
Which is why I stated my request as "list the things that you don't think should be up there" rather than "explain to me why secrets should kept"
In regards to your actual example, you will also remember I stated that for any item you listed, someone should be able to come up with a reason for it.
Here is my world view. There may be secrets you'd like to keep about yourself. There may be ideas, fantasies, even events in your life that you don't want shared with the world.
But a political party is by definition a public entity. You are attempting, by your membership, to guide public and government opinion. Your membership to a party should not be a secret. Not in Britain. There are countries in this world where that would be different. But Britain is not one of them. It is not a tyranny. It is not run by a government that is going to go and shove these people into internment camps. The BNP has a history of attempting to play the 'man in the shadows' of attempting to get people into position of authority while hiding their affiliation. This, IMO, is wrong. Even if they weren't the more legitimate sibling of the Nazi's and KKK.
The McCarthy Era of America was a shame specifically because what happened after people were fingered as Communists then was wrong, not because people were outed in the first place.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Most countries don't restrict news about ongoing criminal trials. England and a handful of other countries do declare some cases to be sub judice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub_judice [wikipedia.org] but most don't and get along fine. Indeed, if I were being tried for a crime I'd rather it be made public. More eyes make it less likely that the government can get away with crap. The problem in these cases is that the British have a ridiculous attitude about child porn where once someone is even remotely accused of having
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a kind of meta exception to that reasoning.
By being transparent about whistleblowers you decrease the transparency by eliminating the whistleblowers. It is the same reason why being tolerant toward intolerant people isn't really a good idea. Or why you shouldn't really feel a need to respect people that doesn't respect others.
I do agree with your last sentence is good though. There is no reason for wikileaks to hide those providing them with services and other support. That is just the same lack of
If it's really secret Wikileaks doesn't have it. (Score:5, Insightful)
In order for anything to appear on Wikileaks its secrecy must already have been compromised. Wikileaks merely makes this fact public. Thus when one of the very few things that should legitimately be kept secret appears there it is evidence that someone is incompetent; not that Wikileaks is irresponsible.
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Re: (Score:2)
Really? you can't see any reason for a place people can leak information?
Yes, you just goosestep to what ever drum your corporate master beat.
Yes I did!
Re:No sympathy for trust breakers (Score:4, Informative)
A lot of what he said is illogical and untrue. Wikileaks does fact check, and in fact if what they posted wasn't true then it wouldn't be so controversial, and governments around the world wouldn't be attempting to shut them down. And no they don't post juvenile and second rate stories; a lot of what they publish is of important political and human interest.
Well it seems I've unintentionally replied to the GP in a round-about way.
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Re:No sympathy for trust breakers (Score:4, Insightful)
You and I speaking about the same group chief?
The group that published, among other things, leaked ACTA documents?
Cause folk who are willing to play host to that sort of item are doing a far far greater service to us than a hundred Pirate Bays.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Wikileaks does not get in trouble for things which aren't true (or not solely due to untruths). It's the true things that people make the most fuss about. For example, the leaked Scientology OT documents were verified as genuine by the legal threats made by the COS, which were based on IP law, not defamation.
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Because it's much more important that we get to see Gary Busey's drunk-driving mug shot than to find out that a major Western democracy has secret prisons where rendition and torture are practiced.
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I wasn't offering it as an example of a "good" leak, but as an example of a factually correct leak which still caused legal trouble.
Re:No sympathy for trust breakers (Score:5, Interesting)
Are you sure you understand what Wikileaks is all about? It is precisely about getting information that has been concealed from the public out so that knowledge of the truth of the world can be available. Most people live in a pretty strange dream world where there are "good guys" and "bad guys" and some really strange notions that are used to divide the world into factions that intend to kill one another.
As to your allegations of making information available for "identity theft" you are out of your head. There is a bigger problem. No one can steal an identity. What people can do is make others think that they are someone else. That is not "theft." That is fraud. The people being stolen from through the use of fraudulent means are the people who most depend on a system of identification that puts numeric tags on everyone for the purposes of tracking and controlling them. And when someone pretends to be someone else in order to fool someone else into giving them money, goods or services, in what bizarro world is it the "fault" of the person whose identity was forged or mimicked? "Identity theft" is the name given to fraudulent activity to make it seem as though the "victim" is the person whose identity was copied when the actual victims are those who were fooled by the fraudster. All of this is facilitated by these numeric tags and data records that are assigned to people. This system was created to make it easier to track and trust individuals for business purposes and somehow, the burden and the risk of managing such a system whose primary designers and beneficiaries are government and big money institutions has been placed on the shoulders of the individuals.
You might think your identity lies in the numbers and data records assigned to you. If you do, then you have bought into their game hook line and sinker. I don't. Stay out of debt and you will stay off of their system. People can attempt to "steal my identity" all they want, but since I stay out of debt, there is no way I can be harmed. (Yes, I know that increasingly employers and governments are using credit scores to determine if someone can be trusted... what a big dumb idea that is!)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Employers also prefer to hire those with no family who can pledge their soul to the company and nothing else.
It's like they think they buy you when you sign the dotted line for IT jobs these days including scrutinizing many aspects of your personal life that are frankly none of their f**king business. I'm to the point now that I've declined to take urinalysis tests a few times because I'm tired of being treated like a criminal. And yes, I have clean urine.
I've got a job, it doesn't pay well, but I can affo
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Just ask yourself what do you expect from a wikipedia spin-off?
That a site uses MediaWiki, and includes Wiki in its name, does not make it a Wikipedia spinoff. MediaWiki is free software, and can be used by anyone, for any purpose, and the word Wiki is not trademarked by the WikiMedia Foundation, and thus, anyone can use that too.
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Given there are more than a couple of posts just above you doing some german bashing, might I suggest that posting almost immediately after the article goes up to complain about how there aren't more german bashing comments might seem a bit... hypercritical (and yes, that's the word I meant)?