Unlimited Wikileaks Shenanigans

[The Good Reverend Roger]

If that happens, that key will be released real quick.

Yep.  But it won't be a government that kills him, or even has him killed.

[Cain]

Time for a deranged "lone gunman".  Just like in the good old days.

And hey, he's threatening banks now.  Banks involved in the recent economic crisis.  Banks that took drugs money and laundered it to make up for their sudden liquidity issues.  Banks owned, body and soul, by Russian and Mexican and Chinese gangsters.  I wonder if these guys are ever violent?

[Cain]

LOL RECENT HISTORY

I'm a big believer in openness when it comes to the flow of information. I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable. They can begin to think for themselves. That generates new ideas. It encourages creativity.

And so I've always been a strong supporter of open Internet use. I'm a big supporter of non-censorship. This is part of the tradition of the United States that I discussed before, and I recognize that different countries have different traditions. I can tell you that in the United States, the fact that we have free Internet -- or unrestricted Internet access is a source of strength, and I think should be encouraged.

...technologies with the potential to open up access to government and promote transparency can also be hijacked by governments to crush dissent and deny human rights.

In the last year, we've seen a spike in threats to the free flow of information. China, Tunisia, and Uzbekistan have stepped up their censorship of the internet...

On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress. But the United States does. We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And we recognize that the world's information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Time for a deranged "lone gunman".  Just like in the good old days.

Naw.  Criminals are surprisingly patriotic, and kinda dumb.  He'll get shanked with no prodding from anyone.

[Cain]

Time for a deranged "lone gunman".  Just like in the good old days.

Naw.  Criminals are surprisingly patriotic, and kinda dumb.  He'll get shanked with no prodding from anyone.

I meant more along the lines of "some dumb schmuck being left handling the firearm".  Though you have a point as well.  I can imagine some sentences being reduced, maybe some favours when in jail, something along those lines being handed out.  Shit, there are guys in jail who'd shank someone to have a cell to themselves.

[Cramulus]

feedback requested: http://23ae.com/2010/12/assange-is-not-the-target/

[The Good Reverend Roger]

feedback requested: http://23ae.com/2010/12/assange-is-not-the-target/

Can't see that from this comp, but I have to disagree.

He IS the target.  He SHOULDN'T be, if the angered powers-that-be were smart...But they aren't.  Just as in Iraq, they are obsessed with the "Mister Big" or "kingpin" meme.  If they can get this one guy, they've cut the head off the snake, right?  Wrong, of course, but that's the way they think, as evidenced by the Iraq war and the post-911 reaction.

[Remington]

feedback requested: http://23ae.com/2010/12/assange-is-not-the-target/

Can't see that from this comp

We are living in the backdrop of a great movie, no? At the time of this writing, Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks, has released hundreds of thousands of secret government shenanigans, and promises that many more are to come, including damning information about major American financial institutions. His websites and bank accounts have been seized and numerous politicians call for his assassination. This morning he was nabbed in London for having unprotected sex with two (easily bribed) Swedish chicks. Everybody wants this cat dead.

But when it comes down to it,  Julian Assange isn't even the real target.  They should be worried about the leak phenomenon, which is much larger than some Australian whistle blower.

Swarms have awesome powers in the information age. A swarm of Internet trolls will prank call the same phone number over and over again until the target goes berserk. The cops may be able to track down one or two of the trolls, and the victim may have the resources to send those chucklefucks up the river, but this does not hurt or deter the other 999 trolls in the swarm. They are well protected by numbers and anonymity.

So let's be clear: this isn't about Assange. He's barely even a player. He's just the monkey in the unfortunate position of holding the flag right now.

Assange represents a new feedback loop within the global information system. Some of the system's information has been purposely hidden in a way that it is not subject to external feedback. Assange just managed to dredge it up to the surface where it's subjected to the same mechanisms that are normally focused on public actions. (BTW: this is theoretically what journalism is for) So they can kill Assange, but it won't stop the leak phenomenon. Just like how they can nuke the pirate bay, but it won't stop Internet piracy.

Assange has succeeded at creating a structure which makes private information subject to public commentary. Now he's just the meat associated with it and is not in any way necessary for the process to continue. Do they think that if they lock up Assange for eternity that government agents will no longer leak classified info? Do they think nobody else will set up a site to receive leaks? The Internet is built for communication between individuals and the masses – do they think that's just going to go away?

As soon as the website went down, a number of mirrors appeared. Some government stooge at Columbia warns that even talking about WikiLeaks is a form of thoughtcrime. They're trying to suppress the leaks, but in doing so, have unleashed the raw power of the Streisand Effect.  They've made the information more valuable, interesting, ready to be spread.

They can go ahead and kill him, or his website, but it will just create more variations, just like when they axed Napster and it created gnutella, limewire, and eventually, torrents.  The response to WikiLeaks must be a systemic response. Hopefully the response will be to operate in a more transparent way, to be aware that even private comments have a way of ending up on the Internet, so we'll have to play it clean.

Wishful thinking, I know.

Also, I agree.

[Cramulus]

feedback requested: http://23ae.com/2010/12/assange-is-not-the-target/

Can't see that from this comp, but I have to disagree.

He IS the target.  He SHOULDN'T be, if the angered powers-that-be were smart...But they aren't.  Just as in Iraq, they are obsessed with the "Mister Big" or "kingpin" meme.  If they can get this one guy, they've cut the head off the snake, right?  Wrong, of course, but that's the way they think, as evidenced by the Iraq war and the post-911 reaction.

that's basically what I'm writing about... like GeekDad pointed out, there are a lot of parallels between this situation and Napster. If they want to prevent another WikiLeaks, they have to enact a systemic response. They have to respond to the feedback loop he's created. Instead, they're targeting the lone monkey holding the flag. If they shatter him and his following, it just creates a demand for new types of leak sites -- just like how shattering Napster created a demand that would eventually produce file torrents.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

feedback requested: http://23ae.com/2010/12/assange-is-not-the-target/

Can't see that from this comp, but I have to disagree.

He IS the target.  He SHOULDN'T be, if the angered powers-that-be were smart...But they aren't.  Just as in Iraq, they are obsessed with the "Mister Big" or "kingpin" meme.  If they can get this one guy, they've cut the head off the snake, right?  Wrong, of course, but that's the way they think, as evidenced by the Iraq war and the post-911 reaction.

that's basically what I'm writing about... like GeekDad pointed out, there are a lot of parallels between this situation and Napster. If they want to prevent another WikiLeaks, they have to enact a systemic response. They have to respond to the feedback loop he's created. Instead, they're targeting the lone monkey holding the flag. If they shatter him and his following, it just creates a demand for new types of leak sites -- just like how shattering Napster created a demand that would eventually produce file torrents.

Absolutely.

But governments and other large organizations can't think that way, Cram.  It's simply not possible, for the same reason most Americans think the President is an all-powerful emperor.

[Cain]

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/latest-updates-on-leak-of-u-s-cables-day-9/?src=twt&twt=nytimes

Bwahahaha.

I did mention on a couple of /i/nsurgent sites they might wanna consider taking down some of the groups persecuting Assange (they love media attention, the /i/nsurgents), and I'm sure I wasn't the only one, but I feel extremely happy to have contributed, in some small way, to this.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/06/latest-updates-on-leak-of-u-s-cables-day-9/?src=twt&twt=nytimes

Bwahahaha.

I did mention on a couple of /i/nsurgent sites they might wanna consider taking down some of the groups persecuting Assange (they love media attention, the /i/nsurgents), and I'm sure I wasn't the only one, but I feel extremely happy to have contributed, in some small way, to this.

Now hackers are "terrorists", by the way.

[Cain]

Naturally.

Hell, I'm just waiting for Wikileaks to be officially designated a terrorist organization.  That means anyone who has ever given them money will be listed as financial supporters of terrorism, and as we all know, there are no legal differences anymore in treatment for those who support terrorism and those who enact it, unless the financial supporters are Saudi princes in which case everyone just forgets anything ever happened.

Edit: I just realized, this makes me, in this case, the Anwar al-Walaki of cyber-terrorism.  Oh man, that is so much better than when TCC tried to get me labelled as a "cyberterrorist".

[Triple Zero]

shattering Napster created a demand that would eventually produce file torrents.

little pedant/nitpick about this, the BitTorrent protocol was in fact honestly designed as a method of dividing bandwidth costs over the groups of users downloading a large chunk of data. AFAIK one of the motivations was for instance how back in the old days when a new Linux kernel-update was released, the servers would be clogged for days. In fact the torrent protocol has some sort of built-in feature for stopping the spread of a torrent (according to article I read yesterday, don't press me for details), except like much measures against piracy, it doesn't really work well enough to stop piracy (or something).

It's just that, a lot of the large post-Napster filesharing networks not only were attempted to be torn down, the content-providers (media-industry) also actively made efforts to "poison" filesharing releases with corrupted or fake data. The fact that BitTorrent has built-in checks against this kind of poisoning (it's infeasible, if not nearly impossible) was (again according to that article) one of the major factors of the large piracy public's move from the filesharing networks to torrents. That BitTorrent also happens to be very decentralized, as well as offering torrent-searching/indexing sites a way to index and make available pirated data without actually hosting it themselves (making them somewhat legal, at least until the big media corps lobbied against PirateBay) seems to almost have been somewhat of an afterthought or added bonus.

Anyway, I'll give your essay a better read and my thoughts later, ok.

But governments and other large organizations can't think that way, Cram.  It's simply not possible, for the same reason most Americans think the President is an all-powerful emperor.

True, but that doesn't mean it should not be pointed out. You might actually convince an individual or two, that way, if they bought into the gov/corp ways of reasoning at first.




Unrelated, another choice quote from the Guardian's feed, pointing out Visa and MasterCard's hypocrisy:

4.14pm: Charles Arthur, the Guardian's technology editor, points out that while MasterCard and Visa have cut WikiLeaks off you can still use those cards to donate to overtly racist organisations such as the Knights Party, which is supported by the Ku Klux Klan.

The Ku Klux Klan website directs users to a site called Christian Concepts. It takes Visa and MasterCard donations for users willing to state that they are "white and not of racially mixed descent. I am not married to a non-white. I do not date non-whites nor do I have non-white dependents. I believe in the ideals of western Christian civilisation and profess my belief in Jesus Christ as the son of God."

[NWC]

I've been spending 1-2 hours a day for the last week reading this stuff, but I'm far too exasperated to say anything useful about it. Then you got Obama bending over to the republicans wishes on the tax cuts, it's a bad week to spend so much time looking at the news.

What I wonder is really how many people, among those who have opinions on the matter and are not a part of a government, actually think negatively about the Wikileaks organization, cos everyone I've talked to is just disgusted by the way they set up some bullshit rape charges that just happen to be at the same time as the release of these documents and then expect us to believe the two are not related. It's insulting. Why do they even bother hiding it?

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