Wednesday, April 02, 2008


EASTERN EUROPE:
IS THERE A CYBER-ATTACK AGAINST EASTERN EUROPEAN ANARCHISTS ???
As Molly has mentioned here before there have been problems with the connection to the Romanian anarchist site Contra-Doxa in the last two days. Molly was agnostic about the cause of this though she was suspicious because it was occurring at the same time as the Romanian state was attacking their local anarchists. When you attempt to access Contra-Doxa you are diverted to a page from Ask.Com, a search engine. No amount of trying will get you from there to Contra-Doxa. Ask.com is the successor to the old 'Ask Jeeves' search engine. This company has been engaged in some past shady practices as you can see from the article on them on Wikipedia.
All that is fine and good. As I said before I have never seen this happen in the many months that I have been accessing and reading Contra-Doxa via my Links section. Imagine my surprise when I attempted to access the Polish Centrum Informacji Anarchistcznej site, which has been linked to this blog for far longer. The exact same thing came up. Now the C.I.A. (an unfortunate acronym) has never seen such a thing before. I've started to go through other eastern European sites. Avtonom and three Czech sites haven't been affected. But I think that the fact that both the Romanian site and the Polish one have had their connectivity cut is much more than coincidence.
Who to blame ? Perhaps Ask.com, as some sleazy business maneuver. Perhaps fascist groups. Perhaps the Romanian government. perhaps some other set of secret police. Who knows. All that I can say is that something seems to be happening that is rather disturbing as it points to a vulnerable spot in present day anarchism.

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