Invisiblog nothing more than an excuse to pedal filth
Duncan Riley> I stumbled across a relatively new blogging service today (via Dave I think) by the name on Invisiblog. Normally I would be trumpeting the launch of a new blogging service, particularly a free one. The service provides blog publishing by “using GPG and the Mixmaster anonymous remailer network” to guarantee anonymous blogging. Good in the world of censorship you’d think? So would I normally. I know many of you reading this will be strong advocates of free speech on the net. But the devil is in the detail. Headlining invisiblogs most recently updated blog today: “Diary of a Paedophile”.
Free speech has its limitations.
I could spend an entire evening typing a post into how every bone in my body is sickened by what is found on this site, but I’ll leave that for another day. As a blogger I would much rather out those who pedal this filth.
The site lists its origin as a “Vigilant.tv production”. Never heard of them until today. The first thing that strikes me about their site is the contact details “tips, lawsuits and suggestions”. A little rummage through some whois checks and you find that both sites are listed, to my horror, to a fellow Australia, one Charles U. Farley, with a street address in St Leonards, Sydney and a postal address out in the suburbs in Baulkham Hills.
Now Australia being Australia we have far stricter privacy laws than the United States so tracking down some background on Mr Farley is not that easy. His main site leads itself to a left of centre bent, and there are numerous references to him on Google, one attributed to a Chuck U Farley on The Age is of interest
“Florida is wrong that the creative Australian economy is only in Melbourne or Sydney — Australia has no creativity. Anyone with a brain prepared to use it has left the country and won’t come back. ”
Sounds like a nice sort of guy (not).
Now I now for a fact that hosting such a site under Australian law is a definite no-no, so the next question is: where are the sites hosted.
Registration for invisiblog is with AlphaOmegaHosting.Com, Inc. a Christian owned and operated web hosting company based in Woodstock, GA. An interesting choice for a site providing a voice to paedophiles. Yet the host name required some more work dns7.gahost.com. Both whois.net and register.com came up a blank on the ownership details: in fact the host is “registered by anonymous” and provides a blank whois record. A Google search resulted in a link back to AlphaOmegaHosting. So a fair conclusion is that the site and contents are hosted at AlphaOmegaHosting. The Christian owned company is registered to a Danny Shurett of the same Woodstock address.
So basically we have a supposed Christian in Woodstock and an anti-Australian in Sydney peddling paedophilia. Interesting mix. Please feel free to contact Charles or Danny with the message that free speech is sacred and should not be abused. In hosting this filth you give a bad name to all bloggers.
Peddle, not pedal!
The paedophile, if it is one and not a silly title for a blog, and possibly Invisiblog, are breaking laws.
> providing a voice to paedophiles.
Why does the author want the site operator hounded for providing a voice to *any* individual? If he doesn’t like what someone is saying, he has the option of his own voice (as with this article), or of ignoring what he doesn’t like.
The author does *not* believe in freedom of speech, though, if he believes that some things should not be said.
> The paedophile, if it is one and not a silly
> title for a blog, [is] breaking laws.
And there’s the core of the issue. Freedom of speech includes the freedom for individuals to *say* whatever they like, in some public venue. If the alleged paedophile is physically engaging in illegal activity, *that* should be punished.
But if you value your freedom to say what others may not like, you must also protect the freedom of others to do it too.