Serious or not, I just heard on the news that the Registrar for Wikileaks.com, at the insistence (and threats) of Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joe Liberman, has withdrawn the site DNS. If you try to go there, you'll get the image below. Earlier this week, it was with pressure from Liberman that Amazon tossed Wikileaks off its cloud.

Shortly after that, Liberman persuaded a small ISP in Tacoma to take down a chart (not prepared by Wikileaks but by a newsman in England) showing the count distribution of leak documents by country concerned.

I don't know about you guys, but I think the Senator oversteps his mandate by a ton; ignores the first amendment, cancels contracts without a shread of due process.

I think free speech just took a bath in the USA and it's long past time for ICANN to move offshore. I'm glad my own domain is registered in Canada.

As Mike Masnick (Techdirt) puts it: "US Has Lost All Moral High Ground On Internet Censorship".


Further, doing that just makes the site more interesting; more folks who haven't looked to date will now. "The Inevitability of Wikileaks". See also "Russian Press And Pakistani Courts Apparently Have More Respect For Free Speech Than Joe Lieberman"

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has it right:

Wow! Adobe must be flinching at the 'closedness' of the Internet being censored. Seriously, I should have the right to post anything I want at anytime I want, if it's 'open' - stuff like the App Store is reasonably moderated.

This guy makes a good point: To Tell the Truth. Great subhead: "Maybe the government would earn more of our trust if it leveled with us more and invaded our privacy less."

Government employees are not to view wikileak documents
 

Now if this isn't losing some rights, then I don't know what is. This is just getting cracy. When it's in the public domain already what right does the government have in telling their employees what we can and cannot look at.

I'm getting sick of this kind of stuff.


http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/12/03/wik...ing/index.html

One of the lessons learnt in all this (at least I hope so) is that once something is "out there" it's "out there" to stay. It's not like the "old days" in which you could collect all the extant copies of a newspaper, for example. In a huge distributed network that the Internet is, it's virtually impossible to kill data while someone somewhere has a copy. I've read that this latest Wikileaks dump comprises approximately 2 Gigs of data in total, not all of which has yet appeared. Easy as pie to move around (a 4GB Sandisk thumb drive goes for about $5 nowadays). Further, I've read that before these leaks appeared on the web, Assange had them vetted (and somewhat redacted) by the Guardian (UK) and by the Associated Press, so we know they have copies (and you can bet, safe backups) of the originals.

It's not unlike music and movies. Once it's out there, it's out there. The offended parties can rant and rave all they want to -- it just encourages them.

I think that one of two major things will happen as a result of this Wikileaks stuff:

1. It will show to governments that the internet is free and that you can't stop people from doing stuff on it; and so attempts like those in Australia to forbid and censor will stop.

2. Governments will crack down and legislate to regulate and register as much of internet use as possible, so that there will become two internets: the approved one, and the shadowy underworld of dodgy-ness.

Let's not forget DARPA invented the Internet. So you would think that DARPA has control over it.

In essence, benwiggy is right. There is already a "shadowy underworld of dodgy-ness" in the form of encryptions, torrents, etc. and it will only grow. Google "wikileaks insurance torrent". Once something is a torrent, it's everywhere.

I like this bit from Reuters: "Analysis: WikiLeaks stirs debate on info revolution":

As the article puts it rather succinctly: "The first infowar is now engaged".

But this is the part that disgusts me:

Less responsible political figures are calling for his assassination!

Reporters Sans Frontieres are quoted as saying:

First amendment, anyone? Is the New York Times next?

Right, and DARPA is under the US Dept of Defense. Moral of this story is, "No good deed goes unpunished."

Personally, I am completely confused as to why some think this is a censorship issue or a free speech issue. The man is publishing stolen information world wide. What about the rights of the individual who was robbed?

Remember the guy who hacked in and stole some of Sarah Palin's emails? Prosecuted, convicted and punished. Why is this different? Are you drawing a distinction between theft and theft by receiving?

Criminal and terrorist (given the latest publications) seems an apt description to me.

Say what you want, publish what you want.... just don't steal if first.

You are forgetting that Assange didn't steal the documents or hack into any computers to get them. They were sent to him by the private. That misguided young man is in custody and will, no doubt pay heavily having made the mistake of what's left of his life. If you think Assange should be punished then quite a few web sites, Associated Press, Reuters, and national newspapers should be as well. They all published them.

Yes I think they are guilty. If the damaging published docs came out of my post office box instead of the State Department's computer file, I would be suing them and begging for criminal prosecution.

If someone steals a lawn mower from your yard and gives it to somebody else, does the mower now belong to that somebody else? And if the 3rd person accepted the mower with full knowledge that it was stolen, is he not guilty of a crime.....Theft by Receiving? Why are electronic communications different?

From Wikipedia:

Should the NYT have been prosecuted?

You said:

Because the information content of documents are not physical objects. If I take a lawnmower from you, you don't have a lawnmower any more and I have one that isn't mine. If I reveal the contents of a document, all other copies still exist; there has been no loss of property. If you read a newspaper, that news is still available to all others who have the newspaper.

One difference I see is that some of these documents were assigned a security classification by proper authority stating unauthorized disclosure would result in serious harm to the nation. Take national security out of the equation, and I could partially agree with you.

We are not, however, talking only about a little embarrassment to people in authority. Publishing a "classified" document that lists critical targets that if attacked could bring the US and Canada to their knees IS a national security issue/threat. And we do not know what else is to come.

The mower was probably a bad analogy... instead let's assume some risque pictures of my wife were stolen (course these would have to be 40+ year old pictures) off my home computer and ended up published on the internet. Does the press have the right to post these if they know in advance the pictures were stolen? I don't think so.... I think I/we have suffered a loss even though we still have the original pictures.

But, I suspect, not unknown by those you'd rather not have know. As I understand it, these files, which came to Wikileaks some time ago, were vetted by members of the the Guardian editorial staff and by members of the Associated Press before any were released. According to Assange, his own people also either redacted or removed some documents as well where agents or soldiers would be put at risk. I guess what I'm saying is that the major impact is embarrassment, not danger to the USA.

About 50 years ago now, I had a top level security clearance in Canada to work on a sub-chasing hydrofoil boat and some of the gear it would carry at a Naval Research Establishment. Canada was building one with fixed ladder foils and the US was building one on the West coast (Seattle, I think) with controlled surface-piercing foils. Ultimately, the two programs were canceled after prototypes were built, but some of the gear we developed (and won't describe) ended up being used in both the US and Canada. Before the full-scale boat was built, however, and while it was still classified as far as I was concerned, an artist's rendering of it appeared in the papers, released by the Minister of Defense.

During that time years ago, I read hundreds of classified documents and examined hundreds of classified plans, engineering drawings, and circuit diagrams. About 80% of them were obvious and shouldn't have been classified and 20% actually deserved their classification. Among those that shouldn't have been, many of them would have been embarrassing -- things like commentary on the the Seattle effort and its politics.

Years later, I had a brief US security clearance while I worked (as a consultant) on something for the US Army out of Fort Belvoir in Virginia while I was a faculty member at MIT. Again, it was just engineering. I couldn't see why the work was classified.

1) I assume your wife won't read the 40+ remark....

2) Of course you'd have suffered a huge invasion of privacy, I agree entirely. Does the press have the right to publish them -- possibly. Suppose your wife was running for public office. Do the voters have the right to know that she once posed nude in the privacy of your home? Obviously not. But suppose the pix were taken at a beach or nudist colony or as she streaked a college football game. Then maybe to probably. It depends on circumstances in a complex way what the press should or shouldn't publish.

Evan Hansen, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired.com has weighed in on my side: "Why WikiLeaks is Good for America"

If someone stole risque pictures of your wife and published them on the internet, then the media would probably consult with the FCC on this matter. They probably wouldn't post them because they don't make it a practice of publishing the names of victims. I guess that they have figured out that this is something ethical that they shouldn't do. However, they do have the right to post them if they are not in violation of the FCC rules. Of course, the real criminal is the person who stole them and posted them on the internet, not the messenger.

There was a case a while back with similar circumstances. Remember the baby who was swung around by a man - and the video went viral. The media CBS,ABC,NBC put this on the air off the internet but the person who republished it on the internet was prosecuted -charges were later dropped. It was a clear violation of FCC rules because they are not supposed to show child abuse and they did. The person who put it on the internet is the only one charged.

I think the government is treading in dangerous waters if they start going after people who simply possess confidential documents. The private is the one who distributed the information and this is where punishment should be dealt out. The government needs to ensure that there information stays confidential and out of the wrong hands. Obviously, they need to give this more thought.

What does the government do the next time someone sends out confidential information across many sites and sources-several 100 or so? Can they really stop this? And would anyone who receives it be liable? Let's face it, we are in the age of citizen journalism and boy is it fascinating!

Ok this is slightly off-topic but just on the topic of receiving stolen goods: When my sister's house was broken into and robbed the thief sold the stolen goods to a local pawn shop. My sister spotted her things in the pawn shop and they identified the thief to the police. However when it came to getting her things back she actually had to buy them from the pawn shop which I found outrageous. I can see that if they had to hand her stuff over they would be out of pocket and this would be a disincentive to cooperate with police but still that stinks.

I feel sorry for your sister. That's outrageous indeed. I wish they would order payback from the thief instead.

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I do wonder if any of the Wikilieaks is disinformation.
Can’t help but keep that option open in my own mind.
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