Why the new website?

Posted on by Annie Machon
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I have great pleas­ure in launch­ing my new, bespoke web­site — made for me by Sander Venema, the founder of Aster­oid Inter­act­ive in the Netherlands.

This is a new com­pany that really listens to what you want, both in terms of design and the back-end sys­tem, and I can­not recom­mend them enough.

So what did I want and why?

First of all, I wanted to get out of the USA domain-name hege­mony. Recently the US has been increas­ingly flex­ing its leg­al muscles inter­na­tion­ally.  It is now claim­ing glob­al domin­ion over all the old domains ori­gin­ally set up in its ter­rit­ory: .com, .org, .net, .info, you name it.

And it does not mat­ter if you are are a cit­izen of anoth­er coun­try, liv­ing in anoth­er coun­try, your web­site is hos­ted on anoth­er coun­try’s serv­ers, and you have noth­ing what­so­ever to do with the good ol’ US of A: if you use one of these domain names, the US gov­ern­ment can pull the plug on your site, with no warn­ing and no redress.  This has already star­ted to hap­pen.

So I am now safely ensconced in Switzer­land — not­ably the only coun­try not to take down the Wikileaks web­site in 2010, des­pite massive glob­al push-back from the US et al.  Switzer­land still seems to be tak­ing basic human rights seriously.

The US con­tinu­ally bleats on about the “free mar­ket”, so let’s vote with our wal­lets and remove our cus­tom bey­ond its per­ni­cious reach.

Secondly, I also wanted to walk the walk and move on to an open source plat­form and CMS (the soft­ware that makes it easy to pub­lish without typ­ing a lot of HTML by hand). This is the only way to ensure that you are not depend­ent on closed, pro­pri­et­ary soft­ware com­pan­ies, which can be leg­ally pres­sur­ised by nas­ties like the NSA or GCHQ into implant­ing con­veni­ent little “back doors” to spy on or manip­u­late your data. I made this move on my laptop years ago and have since enjoyed at least a rel­at­ive sense of security.

Also, as you can see, I value both my pri­vacy and respect yours when it comes to the usu­al “share” but­tons.  But I’m also very happy for you to use my mater­i­al under the Cre­at­ive Com­mons Licence.

And finally, my old site was look­ing messy — so much inform­a­tion, so little time.……

It needed a revamp, and I hope you find this site more user-friendly, and that you can find the inform­a­tion you want quickly. Please feel free to com­ment, or email me with any thoughts or suggestions.

I think Sander has come up with a beau­ti­ful design.  The build­ing in the ban­ner incor­por­ates an image of the old Stasi HQ in Ber­lin.  I like the idea — an image of a pan­op­tic police state that seemed bru­tally immut­able, but that has now just.… gone.

9 thoughts on “Why the new website?”

  1. great job annie!.

    keep the good work!.

    you can show my email adress if you want. cause the estab­lis­ment is afraid of me and not the way around.

  4. I really do like this new web­site; although It’s early days I think it could be a very rel­ev­ant and inter­est­ing site. I like the idea of being able to post com­ments; I believe that many people know some­thing of interest and togeth­er they know much more.

  5. It would be nice if, Annie, you can load up your book Spies Lies and Whis­tleblowers dir­ectly onto your site. Every time when I go on Scribd to read your book, the com­puter will freeze. Scribd seems very bad for com­puters. I know Dav­id has already spent all that energy load­ing your book there… 

    It would also be nice if you can have a page for people to pose ques­tions, about your book or any­thing else, and you can respond to some of them when you have time. Everything you say in your book seems believ­able, there is just your and Dav­id’s con­firm­a­tion of the “offi­cial story” about who did the Lock­er­bie bomb­ing which really threw me off. Every­where else it is said that the Liby­an is framed, that the CIA and the Syr­i­ans did it. But I don’t know how to ask you how it is that you and Dav­id some­how agree with the offi­cial story.

  6. Your new web­site looks good.

    One of the fea­tures of the now defunct WikiLeaks​.org web­site which made it hard to cen­sor, was its suc­cess in get­ting mul­tiple altern­at­ive domain names or sub-domains — “cov­er names”, registered by volun­teers around the world, point­ing to the actu­al web site content.

    Please pub­lish one or more PGP / GnuPG Pub­lic Encryp­tion Keys, togeth­er with Fin­ger­prints, as a text file or blog post­ing page (use the HTML“pre” tag) on this web­site and on the pub­lic PGP Keyservers.

  7. Nice lay­out and easy to read front page, will check out the rest in time. Glad to know you are still around,