ISOC looks at the extra-legal activity aimed at Wikileaks

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.

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