Bogdan Gavrila and Blackmailing

August 16, 2008 · Bagat la Diverse 

Soo… I think I’m getting close to the issue of “blackmailing” mentioned by Bogdan Gavrila in one of his recent posts (warning – written in english – his post, I mean, not mine; mine is romglish, lol).
Apparently, it’s about fai.ro, a romanian site which used to(?) publish information about persons (physical and juridical, i.e., ordinary people and organizations) who did register domain names ending with ro.

Back in March 2008, zoso (www.zoso.ro) wrote an article(1) calling into question information available on www.fai.ro; namely, publishing email adresses, phone numbers and other private informations. According to the law, such information should be kept private and it should not be used for commercial purposes.

Using some software, (or other means – the exact method is not known) the owner of fai.ro extracted the database information from RNC (that is the registrar for dot ro domains) and created a site using mentioned information. Obviously, it wasn’t done for any altruistic purpose, such as help for Darfur refugees, or similar endeavours. It was done for personal monetary gain.

Now, the act of distributing private information without specific permission it’s not exactly legal, or so I think.

To make the long story short, the owner of www.fai.ro took down the pages in question(2) (some 100,000 pages indexed by Google at that moment)(3).

It is not clear to me where the issue of “blackmailing” occured; Mr Bogdan Gavrila is clear on this point:

Quote:

“… When talking about ethics and doing things right I remembered a small drama from the industry (via RealKafka): Zoso threatened a webmaster and in the end sent e-mail to RNC just because he didn’t respond to its blackmailing. This new generation of secret police officers think they can publish private e-mails and think they can blackmail and do justice all over the Internet.”

Now, the definition (not a legalistic one) of “blackmail” is:

“Blackmail is the crime of threatening to reveal substantially true information about a person to the public, a family member, or associates unless a demand made upon the victim is met. This information is usually of an embarrassing and/or socially damaging nature. As the information is substantially true, the act of revealing the information may not be criminal in its own right nor amount to a civil law defamation; the crime is making demands to withhold it.”

This, folks, it’s a pretty serious accusation; we’re talking CRIME, here, and IMHO the owner of www.zoso.ro shouldn’t dismiss it lightly. It’s not the same thing as myself accusing Mr Gavrila of stupidity or saying he’s a moron, intellectually speaking… :)
More so, it’s written in english; perhaps some will say I’m being paranoiac, but consider the big US servers down in Virginia. Everything is being tabulated and indexed. Repeat a few times someone’s name in connection with words such “blackmail”, and it gets attention. Especially if you bold it… not the same thing as associating a person with the word “moron”.
Oh, sure, nobody’s going to arrest you … but … a question mark might appear next to your name … and you might have problems obtaining a travel visa … or maybe not. Maybe I’m stupid, as usual (small synapses and too few of them).

Still, I would be interested to know what FACTUAL basis Mr Gavrila has to accuse a person of blackmail. Let’s not forget that he’s somebody with a position in a fairly big romanian media organization; presumably, his superiors know about his accusations; perhaps he even has approval for his statements, who knows?
I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for proof, though…

(1) See www.zoso.ro/2008/03/fairo-hacked.html.
(2) See www.zoso.ro/2008/03/fairo-continuarea.html.
(3) 111,000 indexed pages for www.fai.ro at time of writing.

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  1. Il invit pe domnul Bogdan Gavrila… | Jurnal de Oradea - Mintea Ardealului on August 16th, 2008 8:22 am

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