Updated below – So one morning we woke up to find that your cherished Bananama Republic had been taken down by German host servage.net. Why? Because Jose Garcia, the lawyer of serial criminal Monte Friesner, had written them with something he said was a Panamanian “court order” to take down this website and the author’s personal site.
The pdf of that letter is here. The attached “court order” can be found here.
Are Panamanian court orders – that haven’t even been authenticated – for dictatorship era gag laws enforceable in Germany? Of course not. They’re worth less than toilet paper anywhere outside Panama. The judges in this bizarre country are so mentally challenged and unprofessional that they can’t even spell my name right, so obviously nothing that comes from them should be taken seriously. But Germans will always be Germans, ordnung muss sein, and without even looking into anything that Friesner and Garcia were saying they closed us down. For example, the article mentioned in their “court order” hasn’t even been online for more than a year. It was never hosted at servage.net.
Anyway, over the years we’ve learned that trying to reason with such lame hosting companies is a complete waste of time (we’re simply filing a claim against them, for money) so we moved. To Iceland!
Our new host, 1984hosting.com, rocks. They are dedicated to free speech, and will only honor court orders from Iceland. That country is itself transforming into a free press and free speech haven with the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, an effort to take the best free speech clauses from laws around the world and turn them into one package. Not surprisingly, Iceland has been an important hub for the activities of the WikiLeaks media organization.
Last but not least, the country isn’t afraid to tell the FBI to just shove it, so we somehow don’t think that Friesner’s Panamanian flim flam lawyer with his “court orders” will get very far in the land of the geysers – although we’d just love to see a delegation of third world pompous asses of the Panamana public ministry roam the streets of Reykjavik looking for clues in their case of “crimes against the honor” of their favorite shyster du jour.
Garcia also tried to have our domain names suspended, without any success.
The legal case itself is being appealed, by the way, and will probably drag on in Panama’s judicial madhouse for quite a bit of time. Officially, your editor hasn’t been notified of anything at all – I only learned about this court stuff through those pesky Germans. That’s Panama for you!
End result: A lot of time and energy wasted, and the only enterprise and website that continues to be shut down by Panama’s authorities is Monte Friesner’s own Pronto Cash. Congratulations, bozo!
Update Feb. 5: Servage is now becoming aware that they screwed up, and has given a series of contradictory excuses and pretexts for closing us down. First it was the Panamanian “court order”. Then there was supposedly “damaging content” or “infected files” on our account (there were none). Then they quoted this very article, which was written and published after the account was suspended, as the reason for the account suspension, taking their bizarre behavior to a whole new level. Compare that to the response of our new Icelandic host when Friesner’s lawyer tried to make them too close us down, “this nonsense doesn’t dignify a response”.
All this does is sustain our claim against Servage, of course. Needless to say we would discourage anyone from doing business with these clowns.
Leave a Reply