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BELGRADE: Kostunica’s Democratic Party of Serbia Claims Milosevic
Government Hacked its Websites, Blocked and Intercepted E-mail Service
of Democratic Party and Other Opposition Groups

by Xeni Jardin (xeni@siliconalleyreporter.com)

EXCLUSIVE. As crowds of approximately 250,000 opponents of Yugoslav
President Slobodan Milosevic gather tonight in downtown Belgrade to
demand that the President concede defeat to apparent election winner
Vojislav Kostunica, representatives of Kostunica's Democratic Party of
Serbia informed the Silicon Alley Daily in an exclusive interview that
websites and e-mail service for the Democratic Party of Serbia and the
Democratic Opposition Coalition of Serbia were temporarily "hijacked"
and redirected by technicians acting on behalf of the Milosevic
government. The "Web takeover" reportedly began on election night,
Sept. 24, and lasted more than 18 hours through the following day--a
critical period during which the democratic opposition had planned to
announce election results online and via e-mail to supporters.

Sources from Belgrade further informed the Daily today that other
popular opposition websites in the region such as www.freeserbia.org
and www.izbori2000.net (Serbian for "elections2000"), were similarly
blocked and redirected by agents acting on behalf of the Milosevic
government.

"We believe Milosevic knows that 80 percent of [the] people in
Yugoslavia are against him," said Ivan Nesic, communications
representative for Kostunica's Democratic Party. "He's probably trying
to make our communication even harder because in these moments,
communication is one of the keys in winning this battle.

"[The Web] server where we host ds.org.yu is in America, so blocking
sites that are not in Yugoslavia is very hard," Nesic continued. "They
changed name server caches at the state-run ISP 'PTT YU,' and from
within the academic network, which is also under government control."

Milosevic's Socialist Party did not respond to requests for comment.

Serbian Democratic Party representatives say they are preparing for
anticipated further online attacks by posting their domain's numeric
IP address on the opening page of each site, thereby providing
visitors with a way to authenticate each site's status and content.

When asked whether similar incidents had occurred prior to the
election period, Nesic said that while previous interference with
e-mail service had taken place, "This time, they actually wanted to
prevent people in Yugoslavia from learning the real results of the
election.

"Like all media in Serbia, the Internet is under pressure by
[Milosevic's] Socialist party," Nesic stated, "We assume that our
government organized people to deliberately jam our [online]
presentation, and we now know they are using the academic network as a
shield and as their Internet headquarters."

Nesic explained that the Yugoslavian academic Internet system is one
of the most accessible sources of Internet communication for citizens
of this region.

Speaking to the Daily from New York, RadioB92 co-founder and Belgrade
native Drazen Pantic, a co-director of New York's Location1 gallery
and recipient of the 1999 Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer
Award, said he believes similar occurrences are likely to continue
throughout the next few days as the crisis surrounding the Yugoslav
elections continues. "It is ... obvious that the Milosevic regime is
taking the Internet very seriously as a propaganda tool and more
importantly, as a source for gathering information about opposition
groups," he said.

Radiob92 is a Belgrade-based independent news organization and
pan-media broadcaster. The venture, founded in 1989, is widely
considered to be Yugoslavia's leading source for independent news.

According to Pantic, the official administrator of the .yu top level
domain for Yugoslavia is the University Information Center, headed by
Bane Ivkovic, minister of science and technology for the Milosevic
government.

Pantic said, "[Ivkovic] apparently ordered his technicians to
compromise the records of freeserbia.org and izbori2000.net, redirect
the corresponding web pages to other [unrelated web sites], [and]
redirect the e-mail traffic of freeserbia.org and izbori2000.net to an
unidentified route. As a result, the live broadcast from the streets
of Belgrade on www.freeserbia.org and www.izbori2000.net became
unavailable. ... Sources from Belgrade claimed that [the hijacked
sites displayed] pornographic images, flames against opposition
leaders, and pictures of empty streets--their 'proof' that the reports
about thousands of anti-Milosevic protesters on the streets were
false."

A statement issued by FreeSerbia explains that the organization's
technical staff contacted the .yu domain administrators to demand an
explanation. "Asked whether there was any legal basis for this action,
Nenad Krajinovic, an administrator of the org.yu Internet domain, said
they had been ordered to do so by the Serbian Ministry for Science and
Technology and that Vlada Teodosic, Dean of Belgrade University
Electrical Engineering Faculty which managed the administration of the
org.yu Internet domain, passed on the ministry's order."

In an interview today from Belgrade, RadioB92 co-founder Gordan
Paunovic told the Daily, "Very little independent media remains in the
country ... so, for days [during the period surrounding the
elections], freeb92.net [Radiob92's website] had approximately 100,000
unique visitors daily, with more than 3 million requests from our
webserver per day ... pretty strong hits considering that there are
only around 250,000 [Internet] connections in Yugoslavia."

Paunovic further reported that this week RadioB92 and its partner, TV
ANEM, successfully completed a precedent-setting combined Internet,
terrestrial and satellite broadcast of election news from Belgrade.

"We used a 2 Mbps leased line, going to a dedicated Real Video server
in Belgrade, to our broadcasting studio in Bosnia," he explained. The
video stream was then broadcast to satellite and terrestrial TV
recipients throughout the Balkan region, thereby becoming accessible
to nearly all of the region's TV-vieweing population. A direct,
non-Internet satellite or terrestrial television broadcast would have
required a license from the Federal Ministry of telecommunications,
said Paunovic--and approval of this independent broadcast by the
Milosevic-controlled ministry would have been highly unlikely.

"Here in Belgrade," Paunovic observed, "we had to get the best from
the Net."