Greek Blog Aggregator Arrested

arcanumas writes to tell us that Greek authorities have raided the house of Antonis Tsipropoulos, administrator of the blog aggregation site Blogme.gr. His hard drive was seized and he was arrested. The impetus was a satiric website, not named in the stories, that apparently offended a Greek public figure (also unnamed). The site in question was not hosted by Tsipropoulos but was merely linked to by his RSS fed. From the first article: "The developing story coincides with the Internet Governance Forum being hosted in Athens this week, to be attended by Internet luminaries, entrepreneurs, and activists like Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, and Joi Ito and featuring panels on Openness and Freedom of Expression."

Remember kids...

The big boys don't like to look bad.

Re:Missread...

They would have done a better job. Probably framed him for downloading child porn, and avoided all this bad publicity.

Monsters

It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster. - Voltaire
Seems to be a monster in the Greek government. I would love to hear some of the luminaries at the conference discuss this and embaress the Greek govenment publicly.

Re:Monsters

Because government and religion are the two main bastions of power. The only way the little guy has a chance is to play them off each other.

Religion, as a whole, is a very bad thing to base government off of because it is so absolutist. "This is the word of God. You can't argue with God. The gov't is God's will on Earth, so arguing with the gov't is like arguing with God, you heretic." The problem is, God isn't around to run things and the people that do, in His name, are frequently bloody autocrats.

Protect yourself

Maybe it's time to start using I2P [i2p.net] or similar?

Greeks will Arrest on ANY Suspicion

If find this link in the main story to be just as alarming or worse: Swedish programmer in Greek spam probe protests innocence [theregister.co.uk]

The Greek police will arrest you on suspicion of spamming. Given the coincidence they have followed as "reasonable grounds" it would seem anyone that gets a virus or trojan that might scan your address book is in jeopardy if they visit Greece. This is just crazy.

Typical

The Greek government is not particularly known for its respect of people's rights. Just ask them if they have any minorities in their country, and how many Greek minorities there are in other countries bordering Greece.

The weblog

Could be this one: http://funel.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
Also, the wikipedia entry on Dimosthenis Liakopoulos is very entertaining: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimosthenis_Liakopoul os [wikipedia.org]

Freedom of Speech

I know sometimes it's hard for us living in the US to remember that our case of (mostly) free speech is not common in other parts of the world.

Even Great Britain has no guarantee of free speech, per se.

Now, if only we could start spreading that around the world instead of spreading DemocracyTM, real democracy might ensue.

My favourite sites are blog aggregators

I don't want to scare my buddies in the aggregator "business", but this is bad news if the arrests happen in the West too. Aggregators aren't huge in the American blogosphere, but they get lots of traffic in Canada, where Blogging Tories, Progressivebloggers.ca [progressivebloggers.ca] and even local ones like Sask Blogs Aggregator [catprint.ca] get more traffic than most individual bloggers.

Lance at Saskblogs has a nice little disclaimer:

Disclaimer:

Catprint Computing, Lance Levsen, and the blog, "Catprint in the Mash" does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites.

What you are seeing is a pull from the originating site. This site, or any of my related websites, are not meant, nor to be interpreted as, an endorsement of the postings, content, or links from the originating sites contained herein.

In other words, you wanna sue? Click the links to find the defendants, cuz I ain't them.

If you find questionable, copyrighted, libellous, or slanderous content, please email me here. I will review your concerns and if I find in favour, will pull the content forthwith.

Cheers,
lance

How?

How is this illegal?

Re:How?

Obviously it is not illegal. The guy was set free the next day. And after all this publicity, I suspect that he will have no problem being acquited in trial.

This is yet another example of litigation used as a means of threat. Unfortunately, this doesn't happen around Greece only. The guys that started all this probably don't have a chance in court, but they sure caused a whole lot of trouble to that guy. I only hope that he will countersue them for moral damage and demand a shitload of money in compensation.

Meanwhile, in the USA....

I still find it ironic that I get a lot of trash talk about how "unfree" speech is the US, yet I see US policitians call each other worse stuff during any election cycle, and no one goes to jail. Just as you can't have a pro-nazi site in Germany, and a host of other restrictions in every other country.

We have our own problems here in the States, (ie: 2600 getting sued for linking to DeCSS code...) but at least pretty much anything goes when it comes to politicians.

Beware of Greeks bearing...

Blogs?

Name of the accusor

the name of the suitor is Dimosthenis Liakopoulos, a well-known tv-bookseller and demagogue in Greece, who also "happens" to belong to the ultra-right wing in Greece I'm Greek, and i got to say I find myself being ashamed one more time, after the "Greece bans Videogames" thingie

Am I alone in this?

Did anyone else read this as "Geek Blog" instead of "Greek Blog"?

Somebody one day will launch

a satellite and host all those "Too hot to handle sites". It would be great having the first public site where anybody in the world can post their thoughts without fear of the jack booted govs throwing them in jail.

AnoNet

To those who feel they might be unjustly persecuted, AnoNet has helped immensely in the direction of anonymity - http://anonetnfo.brinkster.net/ [brinkster.net]

Shame

Shame on the Greek Authorities (Body of Electronic Crime included), really. They've done a pretty good job in arresting criminals that take advantage of child pornography or thieves that take advantage of people's ignorance over the use of electronic payment methods, but some times I doubt if they have the judgeship of how things really work over the internet. Unfortunately there are public prosecutors that simply don't laugh at such accusations.
However, Greek Law is somehow up-to-date for such accusations and I estimate that the defendant will be acquitted. The problem is that the PC of the defendant (confiscated by the authorities) contained important data of his small personal enterprise (that is subsidised by the Greek Unemployment Office - that is in turn funded by European Union) and now his professional reliability is shattered.

Wow

And there's so much talk on here (particularly by foreigners) about how bad the U.S. has gotten. I guess nobody in Greece allows unmoderated comments on their blogs ...

And think...

What will happen when the UN has control of the Internet. Chuck

RSS fed

That's a funny typo. I herby proclaim that the past tense of RSS feed is now RSS fed.

For post #3!! Embarrassing the Greek government .

I say this from experience. I'm Greek and lived in Athens for four years. You said that they should publicly embarrassed the Greek government. Well, there is no need to do that. Reason being . They do a good job of that on their own. If you didn't know they just recently had their elections and if you have ever watched their pre-election political debate they get up on the podium and fight like a bunch of old housewives. I believe that their government is probably the most corrupt and money under the table country and government, and the money under the table isn't only to politicians. I mean everything works with the money in an envelope there. Being that it's free hospitals (not free, payed by taxes that go up every other week) If you are seriously hurt and you go to the hospital it doesn't matter. you'll sit there for hours till the doctor takes care of the people that gave him a little envelope of money. I personally seen this when I lived there. Same thing with my school bus driver. Being that I'm American, I had to go to the American-Greek school on the old U.S Air Force Base (Helecon) and even though when he picked up a kid about 2 miles down the road he still wanted to go down the other street and make me go to the stop that was about 4 miles from my house, just cause he's lazy. Well, that was fixed with a bribe and he would now stop about 600 yards from my house. Being that the school, buses there are only Privately owned tour buses and the driver gets a list of kids and addresses and he would make up his own route. Now I know I'm a little off topic but this is just to let you know how corrupt things are over there. Not to mention the the border there is a joke and everyone and everything gets in and out of there as they please with no problem. When you go to the supermarket your actually surprised to see a Greek person. It's pull with Albanians, Pakistanis Afghans, Iranians, Iraqi's, Russians. Everything you name it, and I bet you only 10% of them went through customs. If that. Want to talk about terrorist hideouts... that would be the place... The cops over there are a joke... All you see them do is sit in front of their station drink coffee, play cards or backgammon or argue about politics or their soccer team. The only way they catch crooks is if something stupid happens and someone called the police and the crook decides to stay around for a while then they get there about 30 min later. Talk about response time. Now I go there every year to visit my dad and I'll tell you what. Nothing has changed...

Re:RUN BITCH RUN !

The lima beans had their chance, they fucked it up.