ISOC – the internet society that is probably the closest thing that the internet has as a governing body said
The Internet Society on the Wikileaks issue
Recently, we have witnessed the effective disappearance from the Internet of a website made infamous through international press coverage and political intrigue.
The Internet Society is founded upon key principles of free expression and non discrimination that are essential to preserve the openness and utility of the Internet. We believe that this incident dramatically illustrates that those principles are currently at risk.
Recognizing the content of the wikileaks.org website is the subject of concern to a variety of individuals and nations, we nevertheless believe it must be subject to the same laws and policies of availability as all Internet sites. Free expression should not be restricted by governmental or private controls over computer hardware or software, telecommunications infrastructure, or other essential components of the Internet.
Resilience and cooperation are built into the Internet as a design principle. The cooperation among several organizations has ensured that the impact on the Wikileaks organizational website has not prevented all access to Wikileaks material. This further underscores that the removal of a domain is an ineffective tool to suppress communication, merely serving to undermine the integrity of the global Internet and its operation.
Unless and until appropriate laws are brought to bear to take the wikileaks.org domain down legally, technical solutions should be sought to reestablish its proper presence, and appropriate actions taken to pursue and prosecute entities (if any) that acted maliciously to take it off the air.
(Italics added) That is my opinion as well. If the crazies in the US and other places want to remove a site then they should do it legally and within the rules of the net. The activity we are seeing at present to take out Wikileaks is just another case of idiots trying to crash or subvert the net. It is no different to the persistent annoyance of virus script kiddies or spam merchants. There is no reason to treat the rantings of Joe Lieberman as being any different.
I’d suggest that ISOC mounts wikileaks.org on their domain servers to emphasize the point.
Presume you mean wikileaks.org in last sentence, Lynn.
Otherwise, agree completely.
Ah yes. Fixed.
Nah. Meat-world laws should be kept from interfering with the internet. Yes, its annoying that the US script-kiddies have taken down the site, but the inherent self-organised criticality of the net has seen this action result in yet another example of the Steisand Effect – a far better outcome than feeding lawyers.
Yeah that is the subject of my next post.
When people set out to damage the internet are they not guilty of a crime? “….idiots trying to crash or subvert the net.” I thought such people could be jailed for doing so.
Are there not laws about spamming? I thought such people could be jailed for filling the net with spam which is what the blockers seem to be doing.
Perhaps some technically able governments who, ahem, would like to uphold the freedom of speech to show the US how it is done, would also assist.
Robert Newman, does a great skit on how the USA is uniting the world, because there is one thing most of us agree on and that is the USA sucks, as Robert says ‘we’ even have a flag, it is like the stars and stripes except it is burning.
His funny 45 min stand up show, – The History of Oil. part 1 of 9 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQhhrzHKMhI