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The attempt to suppress KAOS ...
sorry, but KAOS is unsuppressible |
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| Following
an attempt to suppress the KAOS Supplement, with an obvious threat
to KAOS itself if successful, I have created a bit of a controversy
by taking advantage of my membership of the National Union of Journalists.
The chance to put together this rather spontaneous webpage is in line
with some of the kind of off-the-wall material I now want to make
available on this site.
On August 20, 2002, I received an email from my ISP informing me that it had come to the attention of the BTOpenworld team that my "account has been used for publishing personal information without the permission of the individual concerned". I was pointed in the direction of "The Black Lodge of Santa Cruz" PDF (the KAOS Supplement) and ordered to take it down immediately or have my account terminated.
I complied, citing my NUJ membership, and added that I regarded this as a censorship issue I might take further. I requested more details about the precise nature of the complaint. I was ignored. So I wrote the following email for publication to Tim Gopsill, editor of the Journalist, the NUJ magazine that goes to all affiliated NUJ members in press, radio, and television: |
| Censorship by ISP |
| Recently
I experienced the summary ad hoc censorship of an ISP as a result
of a single anonymous complaint, resulting in a 69 page PDF document
critical of an occult organisation in the US with members here having
to be removed from my website. No explanation was given as to what
precisely was regarded as the publication of "private material
without the consent of the person concerned", who the person
was who complained, or any indication that the ISP (BT Internet) had
even checked whether the complaint was genuinely from that person.
I cited my NUJ membership in response, requesting further details,
and to date have simply been stonewalled by the ISP. In this particular case, I might note that this occult organisation has been getting websites critical of it taken down in the United States for several years now by employing this simple and cost-free tactic of dashing off an email to abuse@whateverISP.com, relying on the ISP's timidity. So it now seems that press freedom is in the hands of people who couldn't care less and totally dependent upon a single complaint from a supposedly aggrieved party. This kind of thing makes a mockery of the web and undermines it as a serious publishing medium, and if it continues it will ensure that the web is capable of publishing only inconsequential pap. It's ironic that the last bastion of web freedom is now the Former Soviet Union. Seems that to be an investigative journalist of any worth on the web necessitates that one become acquainted with the ins and outs of the cyber pirate and locate contentious material in Russian or Serbian cyberspace, shifting hosts periodically behind a Romanian forwarding address. Ah well, if that is the way it is to be... Where does the NUJ stand on this form of censorship? Yours etc Tim emailed me back saying he was thinking of running it as a news story, which was good timing since I had just that moment stirred up the hornet's nest a little (as is my wont) on two BTInternet newsgroups by publishing the letter there for the attention of "BT Openworld Support", who regularly answered posts, stating that I had just sent the letter for publication in the Journalist. The "Support" team may not be the "Acceptable Use" team but a journalist only needs a foot in the door to find the right room, and it was a splendid opportunity to express my true feelings about this whole issue of ad hoc ISP censorship. Here is my subsequent post, Aug 24, 2002, to the non-Google-archived newsgroups btinternet.homepages.authoring and btinternet.support, after the support team had responded to my initial post. This was also emailed to Tim Gopsill at the Journalist. The comments given in blue are from BT Openworld Support, mine in black: Interesting
post. Well you have put your finger on a very good point. For all the "acceptable use" team know or have bothered to find out I may well have that person's permission to publicise such details. How would they know if they don't even tell me who the person is and what details exactly he or she objects to? So, there are two problems there straight away. How do they know the complaint is genuine? How do they know I haven't got permission? Clearly on the latter the inference is that they take the word of what may be a quite spurious and malicious complaint and do not care in the slightest what the website creator may have to say about it. The NUJ is appalled by that kind of lackadaisical censorship. Clearly
you are aware of the guidelines here: Clearly this is subject to a wide latitude of interpretation. Not being told what constitutes such "personal details" in a 69 page document makes it hard to remove such details even if I were in agreement and were willing to self-censor certain pages with a black-out (much like most of the "Freedom of Information" Documents obtained in the US). So I am told to remove the entire document immediately or have my website closed down. Perhaps the person objects only to a single sentence that shows him or her in a bad light, if I was told what exactly the information was that was being objected to I might be in a position to decide for myself that it wasn't so important to the main work and could easily remove it. Besides which, what exactly is a "personal detail"? Is your name a personal detail? Is the fact that a person belongs to quasi-masonic secret occult organisation intent on instituting another form of government in the United States a personal detail, even if true, even if I have documentation to prove it, even if they have admitted it in another context? Does the fact that, for example, a person was convicted of keeping a 6 year old boy chained in a hotbox in the Mojave desert for 56 days, even if true, even if already published in the New York Times, become a "personal detail" if repeated on a BTInternet website? Where does a "personal detail" start and end? Clearly on this basis no newspaper in the world would ever be able to be published. Not only this, obviously numerous personal websites on your servers are already in contravention of your guidelines and await only a single complaint to get them taken down. Is it right that website creators should have their hard work subject to such a vague catch-all condition and live in apprehension of the censorship team swooping down on them like some D-Notice Committee for publishing some trivial detail that someone with an overlarge ego and a chip on their shoulder decides would be a good angle for a bit of petty revenge? The document in question is in the nature of a personal testimony by an individual about what he experienced in secret occult Order in the United States. Clearly there will be much there that this Order does not wish to be known, yet it is still the honest account of a witness describing his own experiences that of course involves others. Can one only write about things as if they were experienced in a vacuum? Is BTInternet too lily-livered to host this kind of thing? (If so, perhaps the Terms & Conditions need amending saying that only websites concerned with collecting stamps and gardening need apply.) If I am writing an online diary, say, and I mentioned that I saw you in the pub on Thursday, would you be in a position to get my website taken down on the basis that you did not wish it to be known that you were in the pub that night? Where does this end? While of course I have much time for the concept of "privacy", and would seek to respect it, there is also such a thing as fair comment in the public interest, giving rise to a grey area whereby certain individuals are able to abuse the notion of "privacy" in order to keep from the public gaze certain information that is in the public's interest. This needs to be defined far more clearly for ISPs I will concede, in the wake of the Godfrey vs Demon Internet case, but this is still no excuse for ISPs to behave like primadonna-ish school ma'ams confiscating feltpens from infants. This is my main point: summary ad hoc censorship, without being given any recourse to answer the case or amend my documentation appropriately. Despite the fact I was ordered to take down the document "immediately", or at the latest within 24 hours or have my website obliterated, I was not accorded a similar courtesy when I responded that I had done so and requested further info. I believe any member of the public should be accorded that respect, but given that I cited my NUJ membership and stated that I regarded this as a censorship issue I was considering taking up further with the NUJ it is doubly foolish and disrespectful to be ignored. Thus the matter has escalated to the degree it has. It is about bloody time, frankly, that the NUJ got to grips with this issue. I think we have pussy-footed around with ISP megalomania for far too long. Latest news... Further details will be published here as they emerge..... I'm in the mood for a scorched earth campaign frankly. In the meantime, "The Black Lodge of Santa Cruz" is on a server hop and at present can be found here. In time I will make a selection of mirrors available, so if anyone wants to temporarily host it on their webspace do get in touch, it would be amusing to watch those who desire to suppress it chasing it all over the web like some devilish little butterfly hard to net. I've set up a "kickme.to" redirect address, you can use the following cloaked URL to find KAOS should it be entirely shut down on its present server: http://kickme.to/156 Kickme.to has been successfully used by F.O.S.I. for a number of years. Use of the kickme.to URL will mean you are served a single delayed pop-up ad, which can either sit quietly on your taskbar or, if closed, will initiate a further pop-up, but no more after that. This is a small price to pay for the freedom of cyberspace. The browser I use most, Opera 6, has an effective built-in pop-up killer (File > Preferences > Windows > Refuse pop-up windows) that will remove even this slight inconvenience. You may also use the uncloaked URL for as long as it is available, but the moment the original BT account is terminated, should it be, we become invisible and shift like the wind. The site will jump behind the cloaked kickme.to URL to another location and http://kickme.to/156 will become one of our main addresses for the foreseeable future. By using this resource the site's actual location can be switched in a matter of seconds without it ever again being vulnerable to those who seek to suppress words they don't like. In retrospect, I have come to welcome the spur the would-be censors provided for me to branch out into underground and subversive web techniques, since this is the natural environment of KAOS. It also encourages me to make available material I had not originally intended to make public precisely because I knew how easy it would be to close down the website; this is the irony, by their feeble attack they have made us much stronger and more determined. Note the following news story about kickme.to:
Kickme.to also won the appeal, so it is now tried and tested in the courts in Sweden. I've also set up an alternative route to the KAOS website: http://sling.to/156 This is a better URL to use in terms of pop-up ads if you haven't got a pop-up killer, you are served a single ad on exiting the website, with no disturbance at all while viewing the site. The most exciting news, however, is that I have set up a KAOS outpost website in Russian cyberspace, here's the URL: http://kaosbabalon.da.ru There's nothing available on the Russian site at present that isn't also obtainable here, but... how to put it, you may find the site has a different.... er.... ambiance. I've had many emails from people expressing their opinion about this attempt to ban KAOS. I've assembled a selection on a new page: What the public say... I've updated this page with further details on the likely culprit and included a round-up of what's been said about this controversy on various mailing lists and newsgroups. Reviews of KAOS 14 and The Black Lodge of Santa Cruz have been put up on Phil Hine's site, with Phil's comments on this attempt at censorship. He draws attention to an interesting BBC news story on this issue, Gagging the net in 3 easy steps. A discussion of free speech on the Internet and the attempt to ban KAOS has been started by Dave Evans in the forum of Lionel Snell's occultebooks site. Do join in. A thought: Would anyone like me to make the entirety of the OTO's grade papers available (including the piss-takes of them)? Recently hounded off a server in the Netherlands, these papers are authenticated by signatures you may recognise. Just checking out a nice little web provider in downtown Tashkent, Uzbekistan... ...and there's always Sealand This is what I call an "Acceptable Use Policy" "Sealand
currently has no regulations regarding copyright, patents, libel,
restrictions on political speech, non-disclosure agreements, cryptography,
restrictions on maintaining customer records, tax or mandatory licensing,
DMCA, music sharing services, or other issues."
See the official website of the Principality of Sealand It wouldn't be so hard to set up a collective of 'contentious' website creators each having a share of server space. Sealand's least expensive hosting is $7500 a year, with a $750 start-up plus hardware cost. There was a good article in Wired about the new data haven on Sealand, an ex-WWII fortress built by the British in the North Sea in international waters which was landed and claimed by ex-army major Roy Bates (later Prince Roy of Sealand) under dereliction of sovereignty laws in 1968:
Captain Strobe lives!
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