Thursday, June 3rd, 1999

Does your page suppose a risk for you?

Carsten Agger, faklen.dk

    Q: A question: does your page suppose a risk for you, or put in another way: you declare yourselves to be in opposition. In order to mount a Web page and read email you need to connect to the Internet, and it would be quite easy (in principle) for the authorities to find you and crack down on you if they wished. Is this a great risk, or perhaps they are only pleased that the opposition also opposes NATO?

    Being the opposition in Serbia bears a risk generally. All kinds of oppression have been felt by the opponents of the regime during the last ten years - drubbing, imprisoning, mistreating, even executing. (see first part of answer to this question)

    This situation - a state of war is, however, the best opportunity for the regime to kill with blows the opponents. It was proved on the very beginning of the bombardment, even: by banning the independent media; imprisoning or mobilizing various pro democratic orientated persons; setting the capital punishment on instead of the civil law, as well as some other dire rules; finally - by liquidating a famous independent journalist.

    Talking about the students, that we mostly belong to, the situation is quite the same, since we are the ones to start the protests and movements as first. Still, this time the circumstances were such that we thought it would be insane directly fighting against the regime if our hands are strongly tied while theirs are completely free; moreover - the bombs are jeopardizing our existence as well.

    Thereby we decided to use the "advanced technology" and all our knowledge for convincing the world wide publicity the steps of NATO are absolutely contra productive - destroying us, not him. Mostly, the web site aimed to show some other views from Serbia - other than the official ones.

    On the other hand, the web site is not worth too much for the wider stratum of people inside Serbia. That's because of the lack of Internet accessibility, electricity, time and will for surfing the Internet, as well as for all the other consequences the bombardment bears.

    Due to all stated above, we do not represent much of a peril to the regime in these days. The target of our web site is the western publicity, that haven't had much of influence on his reign thus far.

    Technically speaking it would be hard to track us. We took some precaution steps and use some circumstances in our favor. There is no one "state" Internet provider or proxy in Serbia to make all Internet traffic go through it. There are at least six "big" providers with separate links to the "rest" of The Internet. All of them must put some FTP filters in order to find out who is updating our web page - and we changed our web page address couple of times (but http://welcome.to/freeserbia will always refer to the latest one). And even then, if they put those filters, what would happen? They'll found out that some people from few different cities are doing it. Our phone system is rather old than modern, no caller ID feature is provided - actually only a small number of modern centrals (telephone exchanges) do, and we're not connected on them. Of course, one could banned access to a lot of free and commercial web hosts in order to stop this site, but that'll be too much to expect. We are using email addresses on iname.com (free email system) with some fictive names and accessing them with other fictive accounts (it's enough to pay for Internet access here, no one checks out if you gave your real name). Of course it is possible to track, but we think this is more than enough of paranoia (but we couldn't know in the beginning).

    Nevertheless, the close combat is still to come.