You might remember a little movie from a couple years back called Pirate Radio. It was about a group of misfits that were willing to fight the system in order to broadcast the music that a whole new generation of listeners wanted to hear (despite opposition from authorities). In order to get the music to the people, though, they had to broadcast their signal from ships floating in international waters, so as to avoid prosecution and shutdown. Although the movie itself was fictional, the concept was not. In fact, there has been a long history of such “pirate” stations operating legally the only place they can: in international waters. And now it seems that the once-free internet may be headed in the same direction, starting with a little site called WikiLeaks.
No stranger to controversy, WikiLeaks has often drawn fire for its controversial content. With an eye towards revealing sensitive information that governments would prefer remain hidden (such as documents outlining U.S. action in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay), as well as supporting the rights of whistleblowers to out corruption in the organizations they work for, WikiLeaks has frequently found itself at the wrong end of a government investigation. And activist founder Julian Assange, who was in his youth dubbed “Australia’s most famous ethical computer hacker” for his views on finding and sharing information (without the attendant cyber terrorism that often resulted from hacking), has more than once found himself facing a judge for his actions. Interestingly, he is currently being held not for cyber crimes, but for an alleged sexual assault in Sweden, sort of like how Al Capone was finally nabbed for tax evasion.
In any case, the show must go on, and it seems that WikiLeaks investors are more than a little nervous about the future of their site, what with their frontman in jail, legislation like SOPA in the works (it’s progress may have slowed, but government controls on the internet are not going to disappear), and the U.S. government proving that they have a very long arm with their recent shutdown of renowned media piracy website Megaupload (a Hong Kong-based company run by Germans in New Zealand). And apparently they’ve decided that an adventure on the high seas is just the ticket for evading authorities and operating in autonomy.
This is evidenced by their recent purchase of a boat that will serve as the base of operations for WikiLeaks, housing the servers that store the site’s database. Whether or not this is a feasible solution remains to be seen, as no successful test of this type of internet broadcast has yet been documented. In reality, it may be a moot point anyway. The reason pirate radio emcees were free from prosecution had to do not with the fact that their station was offshore, but that they themselves resided in international waters, on the very boats they broadcast from. Since it seems unlikely that the WikiLeaks board of investors is going to move to the ocean blue, they may still be subject to prosecution in their countries of residence. So while they can probably forego the services of a maritime lawyer (not being subject to prosecution under maritime law), they won’t be able to avoid prosecution by the governing bodies of the lands they live in, regardless of where their servers reside.
