Community Choice Award "Most Likely to be Shut Down By Govt"

Last week we took nominations for a Slashdot category at the SourceForge Community Choice awards. Our category was 'Most Likely to be Shut Down By Government Agency'. Your nominations were tallied, and we arbitrarily selected a few that we think are the best. Today is the day where you can at long last determine the winner, using the incredibly scientifically accurate Slashdot Poll. Our nominees are Truecrypt, EFF Patent Busting, GNU Software Radio, WikiLeaks, Cryptome.org, Tor, Freenet, and CowboyNeal.

Government Agency?

[forsetti]

Hmmmm... any government agency? Based on the earlier story [slashdot.org], it seems the U5 governments should be on the list, being shutdown by some Chinese Government agency ...

Any Serious Chance It'll Happen???!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Think about it, what exactly has been shut down by the government lately? Freenet or Truecrypt anyone???!!

I challenge anyone to even find one credible attempt by anyone in government to shut down one of the nominees.

This story is just hysterical scaremongering.

Likely?

[Kohath]

What difference does it make if something is "likely" to get shut down by a government agency?

It matters if something is actually shut down. The answers on this "likely" poll are just a measure of the prejudice (in the dictionary sense of the word prejudice [reference.com]) of the people answering the question.

Where's the answer for "none of them should be shut down, but I prefer to keep an open mind and deal with reality rather than wallow in my own preconceptions about things that haven't happened yet"?

Vote None!

[mveloso]

The government doesn't shut down websites. They can't, legally, unless there's something criminal going on.

Re:The Most Likely Choice...

[UnderCoverPenguin]

Depends on your definition of shutdown. More likely, I see the service being manipulated by social engineering.

Re:The Most Likely Choice...

[moderatorrater]

It's also the one that's the most blatantly illegal and steps on the most toes inside and outside of government. I'll vote for the illegal squeaky wheel any day.

Re:Vote None!

[bsDaemon]

Until they figure on some exigent circumstances. "pedophile terrorist communists use freenet!" use of freenet is then banned.

Someone posts to wikileaks about how the govt made up the charges about freenet, and then freenet gets taken down over "state secrets" or something.

Notions of law and justice are really somewhat quaint these days.

GNU Radio

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets see, you can encode or decode any signal... hdtv, gps. Create ad hoc networks. Communicate directly to others using unknown protocols over an essentially analog medium that cannot be recorded exactly. And you aren't plugged into the grid... there's no account numbers and monthly fees so the man doesn't even know you are doing any of this.

Some people say 'wikileaks' because the man doesn't want you knowing, but imo worse than that is the man not knowing. The man being any of the govt, riaa, mpaa, cable, bells, etc.

Truecrypt can live underground. Wikileaks can't.

[scaryjohn]

As much as I think TPTB would like to kill off truecrypt (assuming it's on their radar), it can live on with underground distribution since it's a software project. Development might grind to a halt, since no one could easily validate the source for various underground successor projects. But checksums for the last known, good version would be as easy to find elsewhere as a bootleged disc of code.

The whole point of Wikileaks is to make things public, so driving leaked documents repositories underground would make them indistinguishable from conspiracy theorists and the lunatic fringe.

EFF Patent Busting??

[OldSoldier]

Well.. if the government "shuts EFF Patent Busting down" by fixing the patent system, then that would be a Good Thing.

Seriously, even the patent office is complaining about the backlog of patents. I think they want a solution as much as the rest of us.

Whew!

[roystgnr]

What a relief.

I guess we're all safe, just as long as there aren't any laws [cornell.edu] or regulations [gpo.gov] that these websites might be violating. I'm sure the authors of Freenet double-check their regulatory compliance every week. After all, the index volume for the Code of Federal Regulations is only 1100 pages, and the other 50 volumes can't be too much bigger. And why even bother reading the US Code? You barely have to skim the thing to determine that there could never be anything illegal about providing assistance to third parties who want to covertly transmit large amounts of unspecified data.

Re:Any Serious Chance It'll Happen???!!!

[Hatta]

There may not have been much direct government take-downs recently, but there's definitely a chilling effect at work here. Which is exactly what the government wants, it's better if it doesn't have to shut down the sites, just scare off the people who run them. Look at Oink, or Overgrow, for examples.

Clearly Neal

[kiehlster]

I went with Mr. Neal because all the other options are products of our society. You can try to suppress society, but it will only rise up against you. You can however take someone out of society and effectively martyr them. Their voice may remain, but their influence diminished. Everything else will reappear in a different form possibly greater than its predecessor. Even taking someone out of society may have little effect on their cause if their cause is strong enough.

I'd say

[esocid]

either Truecrypt or Tor since they can easily be labeled to the public as terrorist tools. Thinkofthegovt! Panic!!

Re:Vote None!

[Z34107]

Just because some of our 535 crazies committed to Congress this session want to shut it down, doesn't mean it'll happen.

A bill was introduced in 1955 to ban Rock and Roll music, for the same "protect the children" reasons used as excuses to ban anything. Of course, that didn't happen - what would've happened to "Guitar Hero?"

Congress wants to look like it's doing something - actually doing it is hard. Watch them ban Wikileaks, make a press release, and then do nothing within their (limited) power to actually shut the site down. They get their press time, everyone's happy.

But, in some ways, that's a good thing. An ineffectual government is better than one with "quaint" notions of law and justice.

Re:The Most Likely Choice...

[Anonymous Coward]

Copyright infringement is a maybe (depends heavily on how good your lawyer is...), but under US law Wikileaks can't be held responsible for displaying things that other people weren't supposed to be sharing. Wikileaks can't very well violate an NDA that they never signed onto and all that. Of course, this is also almost entirely irrelevant, since Wikileaks is based in Sweden, which is also noted for a rather laid back stance on the whole copyright infringement bit (of course, that doesn't mean that individual contributors can't get in trouble in their home countries, especially since many of them are Chinese, but Wikileaks itself isn't terribly vulnerable). So, um, yeah... What exactly is illegal here?

Re:Tor?

[rrohbeck]

I don't get it, why would the government want to shut down a sci-fi/fantasy publisher?

They're giving away free e-books, which obviously makes them part of the anti-**AA/copyright terrist plot.

Re:**AA

[Anonymous Coward]

*AA is more powerful than a government agency. They are the fourth branch of government in the US, and can enact laws worldwide via treaties like ACPA and WIPO. In the US, laws have to pass through them, or else Congresscritters find themselves facing candidates with hundreds of millions of dollars in their war chests against them come next election.

Re:The Most Likely Choice...

[tirerim]

Nothing illegal about it... yet. The point is that WikiLeaks is the most likely to expose information that the government doesn't want the public to know about. That could be anything from treatment of political prisoners to uses of surveillance. Anyone in power who is abusing it (i.e. most of them) will want to avoid having that come to light. Okay, yes, I'm kind of paranoid. The U.S., at least, still has some protections on freedom of speech and press, as do some other countries, and those may actually protect WikiLeaks. But given some of the efforts that governments have been taking to reduce those rights, I'm not certain.

Re:The Most Likely Choice...

[Reziac]

"Wikileaks is based in Sweden, ... What exactly is illegal here?"

Stuff that the *Swedish* government doesn't want leaked.

I'm voting WikiLeaks

[PingXao]

Leaks and are something a politician understands. The rest they rely on their lackeys to explain to them. I'm sure if someone were to take aside some of the more religious conservative elected officials in Washington and show them what a few choice words and mouse clicks can dredge up in the way of pr0n - no age 13 nonsense blocking the way - I'm sure the internet would be shut down in less than a week.

But leaks they definitely understand and posting leaked info online is simply poking the Happy Fun Ball repeatedly with a sharp stick.

GNU Radio

[alegrepublic]

While Wikileaks may be subject to many DMCA take downs, it will be difficult for the Government to shut it down completely because the site falls very straightforwardly under a First Amendment umbrella. So the Government will have to take more subtle actions against it than plain censorship. On the other hand, GNU Radio is a potential threat to many big industries: cell phone providers, HDTV content producers, digital radio and, of course, the military. Furthermore, it is very easy for the Government to ban it (via FCC) due to technical issues rather than the more controversial political issues. If GNU Radio ever works on hardware easy to build by anyone out of cheap components, it will be banned the next day. Imagine being able to build your own cell phone with all the features you actually want... This cannot be allowed to happen.

Re:Any Serious Chance It'll Happen???!!!

[Em Adespoton]

I wouldn't call this scaremongering. Just having a little fun.

There is something about geeks that leads them to be more suspicious of authority. Perhaps it is being ostracized at a young age or the fact that there are simply a lot of really dumb people out there who have somehow manage to get a little power.

I think it's that geeks tend to know a lot about controlling information and how much power that gives a person -- so they tend to see situations that politicians might abuse to gain power that other folk might miss or dismiss.

Re:TrueCrypt

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, even seeing the source might not be enough. Have a look at the Underhanded C programming contest; the code can look perfectly legit, but otherwise fail in sneaky ways. One year's contest was to create an encryption program that would randomly make the output file easy to decrypt.

Even a non malicious programmer can do some foolish things that utterly compromise security - like the Debian SSH flaw just recently.

Even visible code might not be enough. *adjusts special shiny hat*

aside : these CAPTCHAS are really burning my ass.

Re:Any Serious Chance It'll Happen???!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

And Truecrypt is legal in the U.K., but you must turn over your keys when asked to. It's not illegal, but pretty much useless.

That's not true. You just have to know how to use TrueCrypt. The trick that most people don't seem to understand is to use both keys regularly.

The indication they look for that you're trying to spoof them is that the last modified file dates are all months old in your "cover" partition. So don't leave that kind of a signature. Think of one as the "low security" partition and the other as the "high security" partition. I put work stuff on the low security partition and my own stuff on the high security partition and I use them both all the time. In fact, the stuff in the work partition probably has newer timestamps than the stuff in my personal partition right now.

There really is no way to tell that I've got another partition, and a dozen files (or more) in the partition I'll reveal have last modified timestamps as of today or yesterday. Also, I'll put up a serious squawk about needing to protect confidential information for my clients, then give them the key. Then when they actually see the confidential information of my clients...

The best lie is not to lie at all.