"This project unfolded around an anti-NATO militarism web portal that was founded in August 2001 and ran until late 2006. The website gained international popularity over the years through covering news about NATO's expansion into Eastern Europe, its military bases and operations in the aftermath of 9/11. It published over nine hundreds news items, with articles in more than five languages. Beyond the distribution of free information about military misconduct and the economic gains of war profiteers, the website StopTheNATO.org fostered international protests and riots against the military organization.
The website primarily designed Internet protests to interfere with NATO's website and its summits through participatory DDoS (distributed denial-of-service attacks). The artist organized over five of these attacks, publicizing them internationally and providing accessible tools for participation.
On the occasion of a key meeting of NATO leaders at an air force base near Rome in May 2002, he soley organized the Anti-NATO Day, during which activists could flood NATO's website through a Flash script coded and distributed by the artist. Even though the action did not disrupt the target, the threat and the technology developed for the project led to an investigation by the Department of Defense of Canada and U.S. through Verisign's intelligence. Furthermore, the action was covered by international media outlets in Japan and Belarus and was studied by The Eisenhower Institute in the U.S." - Paolo Cirio
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Text "STOPtheNATO.org" project. 28 / 09 / 2001.
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We are delight to introduce a new independent space in order to continue and to intensify the fight against NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) - the armed arm of the world's masters
Against all hypocritical justifications of the war and about the expansionistic and speculative politics of capitalistic countries, it's needed a radical critic and one media reprisal: an attack to lies and to silences that hidden the continuous crimes of the NATO.
It is in order to denounce, document, search, propose and allow discussions and confronts. We wouldn’t forget the people in Iraq, the Depleted Uranium, the wars in the Balkans, the Star Wars, the blood and the infinites tangles of the intelligence agencies and all tons of other crimes, included the current war in Afghanistan. This is considering that in internet even if we found some interesting websites about this topic, often they regard single subject or without having connections to others of same cause: the NATO. We want, therefore, to re-unite and to catalogue all documents, the websites ones of deepening, to maintain an up-to-date main news section, always allowing a search and one fast and clear consultation, with the indexing of a data-base with all the information collected.
All visitors of STOP the NATO website can contribute with inserting articles, forums, links, comments, messages, or simply by consulting the pre-chosen contents. The user is doing greater relief inside the website. This is a capacious container of anti-NATO culture, in which everyone can have and can deposit texts, images, video and audio. Everybody has the possibility to record, search and discuss about the policy undertaken by NATO. It’s an effort to create a free place, where doesn’t exist censorship. Where circulation of the knowledge can be possible without to undergo the official mass media, which are often lying and deceiver. All content is free from COPYRIGHT and hence knowledge is freely available for any use.
It’s an instrument for everybody in order to organize, promote and make actions against NATO. The multi language support allows the user to obtain the sharing of an international node, able to collect flows of information from various sources, archiving and indexing the material also by geographic area. It could be a center of documentation and arguments for activists in several nations.
Thanks for your attention.
http://www.stopthenato.net
info@stopthenato.net
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MANIFESTO UPDATE
15 / 05 / 2004
STOPtheNATO.org made in the August of 2001, after the meeting of anti G8 in Genoa, a little group of Italians had the intuition that the world would go a bad way. They tryed to make a free place on internet in order to document the crimes from the NATO states, and in order to make resistance to the lies of occidental media on the wars that they perpetuate. The project doesn’t want a political definition. It is not communist, anarchist or other - it is a free space where anyone can post news, dossiers, denunciations and debates against wars and military system.
So many people from all over the world contribute to this project, now we have collaborators from many countries and many languages, and almost nine hundred documents that demonstrate the arrogance and the crimes against humanity which have been perpetuated by NATO.
Now the website is the most point of reference about the struggles against NATO. When leaders of NATO do a conference and hence it exists an anti-summit, STOPtheNATO.org is one of main tool in order to share information and tell to everybody another point of view that manifests the dissent.
The main issue of STOPtheNATO.org is collecting information on the internet. In fact with Google and other motor engines and with any keywords the website is always in the top list of results.
Often the information documented comes from main press agencies and newspapers. This policy exists in order to spread documents under copyright, because the information about war must be free and not bought. The content could be not directly against war, it became re-contextualized by the container, and it could be readed in autonomously way. Everyone is invited to realize what is the new NATO.
Another form of protest is the Netstrike that is a virtual sit-in, where a great number of people connect on the same day at the same hour to a institutional website of NATO, and so in cause of a great number of requests the website remain blocked and it is not reachable to any other. This form of protest is not violent and it's not vandalism (the website attacked remains down only for few minutes), it is only a symbolic act.