Teacher Dude has written this excellent email for you to copy/paste and send to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) being held in Athens. Please take this action and spread the word.
To the Internet Governance Forum,
It seems that the Greek state has joined that illustrious list of enlightened regimes that feels that it can use the full force of the law to gag bloggers who have unpopular opinions. The owner of a Greek blog aggregating service www.blogme.gr is currently being sued for hosting a blog with some satirical material about a famous person. Antonis Tsiropoulos, Blogme’s administrator was arrested and hauled off to the spend the night in jail and later to taken in handcuffs to the District Attorney. This is akin to arresting the owners of Technorati or Google in a midnight raid as they hosted something I disagree with.
It is a shame that the country charged with holding a conference on internet issues such as access and freedom of expression should permit the kind of draconian police action seen in the case of Antonis Tsiropoulos.
On behalf on the blogging community, both in Greece and abroad, I call upon the IGF to condemn this action in the strongest terms possible and exert all possible pressure on the Greek authorities to look into the matter.”
(name)
The contact form is here
Technorati Tags: blogging, greece, igf, internet governance forum
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I’ve opened up a blog on the IGF community site and writing there about it:
http://igf2006.intgovforum.org/blog/104
Of course since it links to the blog that started the trouble in the first place, this may get me and the IGF organizational committee into jail. Maybe if there are enough of us, we can play a cardgame together.
My application to IGF has been accepted, let’s see what comes out of that.
The issue has also been picked up by a BBC journalist at the IGF conference.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6090394.stm
Craig, that’s great news. It makes me realise the power of blogging.
Betabug, don’t worry. We’ll all come and visit you ! Good for you for doing this and for planning to use your 90 seconds of fame for our blogger rights and freedoms. Let us know what the reponse is.
Well, I’m here, I arrived too late to ask a question, but Kieren McCarthy from The Register brought the case up:
http://betabug.ch/blogs/ch-athens/476
I’ve talked to him and to the guy from the BBC news site.
Admittance to the IGF forum is free, anyone near here, come over and voice your oppinion (and look at some well clad bureaucrats).
letter sent.
thank you for posting about this devious. it really makes me feel like I am some how helping…
The answer of Greek Government Spokesperson Theodoros Roussopoulos given at the IGF “Openness” session is now online, see his quote:
http://betabug.ch/blogs/ch-athens/480
Uhmm, Diva, if you have any chance, pass by the IGF forum! You will meet lots of interesting people (even though many of the sessions are just a lot of talk, talk). Myself I had just this one day, but it was worth it.