Wikileaks Now Hosted By the Swedish Pirate Party 438
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."
Re:Assange can post whatever he wants... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Nice move (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, The Pirate Bay was up and running again three days after that raid, and still is, and probably will be for the forseeable future. But the prosecutor _did_ raid their web hosting company, take their computers and dozens of other ones that just happened to be in the same room, and kept them for years, long after the time it could have taken the police to mirror the data. That's what I meant.
TPB had the resources and contacts to enable them to just copy their backups to other computers around the world and get the site running again, and I'm sure that WikiLeaks too have lots of hidden backup servers and hidden backup people to run them. Probably lots more than TPB. That doesn't mean that their enemies in e.g. the Pentagon will not try to close them down, one by one.
Re:Assange can post whatever he wants... (Score:3, Interesting)
Pirate Party = Tea Party for geeks? (Score:0, Interesting)
It's true, the Pirate Party equivalent to the Tea Party- only the constituencies are different (left-libertarian-leaning computer geeks vs. xenophobic social conservatives). Both parties are simply reactionary political movements fixated on some bogeyman - The Tea Party has Obama and the Democratic Party to whip themselves into a rabid froth while the Pirate Party is nothing more than a backlash against the excesses of the 'MAFIAA' cartels. Just replace 'Sarah Palin' with 'Corey Doctorow,' 'Ayn Rand' with, I dunno, 'Neal Stephenson,' and 'The Rapture' with 'The Singularity,' to get an idea of the parallels in their cultural and intellectual underpinnings. The only thing missing is a sinister, shadowy organization with deep pockets issuing the marching orders, as with Koch Industries and the Teabaggers, but I won't be surprised if the political pirates are also getting jolly-rogered by some rich people with an agenda.
Awesome (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
Re:Nice move (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow. Are you always this naive? The only thing that comes to mind when I read that was "bullshit". More accurate, "They have established a sufficient, for now, case of plausible deniability as to who is running it."
Interesting Q&A session with WikiLeaks founder (Score:5, Interesting)
An interesting question & answer chat with Julian Assange, who founded WikiLeaks [www.dn.se] 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.
file downloading != piracy (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Do the Swedish have laws? (Score:1, Interesting)
The Attitude that I can break the law in you country because I am not there and you can not touch me. It bodes very poorly for the internet. And I sure any extradition treaty that results will make no one happy.
Re:file downloading != piracy (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Political entity required to comply? (Score:5, Interesting)
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. ~
Re:Source (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Political entity required to comply? (Score:2, Interesting)
The US Soldier handed it to Wikileaks.
Wikileaks handed it to the Taliban.
The US Soldier committed one crime.
Wikileaks committed another.
The US gets to retaliate against both of them.
Two wrongs do not make a right.
Re:Nice move (Score:2, Interesting)
Sweden is not a member of NATO, according to Wikipedia, and they never were one. They decided to sit the Cold War out and remain neutral.
Yeah, but the EU has lots of NATO members. It's somewhat plausible the EU parliament might vote to waive inviolability for that reason. If the PP gets into Riskdagen that changes since it's not illegal to divulge NATO secrets in Sweden (or the other way around), although generally the governments of friendly states try to avoid that. They usually also pressure local media not to divulge foreign secrets. In the case of some random server they could have the police seize it under some vague pretext (like to determine whether any Swedish secrets might be kept on them) - but with the inviolability of Riksdagen this would be impossible. It would require a 5/6 majority to waive inviolability, which just isn't going to happen. MPs handle classified information all the time, and without evidence of actual treason or espionage the vote would never pass; every MP would be asking themselves if they were next...
Re:Nice move (Score:1, Interesting)
One of the Pirate Party's positions is to free information and to have transparent government so that the people can force politicians to take responsibility for their actions. Other forces wants to shut down this freedom of information so obviously this was PPs politics all a long. The only difference is that now they are putting their money where their mouth is (which they already did earlier when hosting Pirate Bay and TOR exit nodes and various other services to give Iranians access to unrestricted internet for example).
This is an uncontroversial decision completely in line with PPs official views and consistent with earlier actions.
In what ways does this make 7% of the Swedes stupid for voting on them?
Re:Great move, Pirate Party. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.