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I support WikiLeaks
It bothers me that the US government is trying to wipe WikiLeaks off the face of the internet. It's true that Julian Assange is insufferably arrogant, monomaniacal, dogmatic, reckless, and too focused on the United States, but I don't want to live in a world in which information embarrassing to the government is so actively suppressed.
In case you're not following along... the state department has pushed at least one college to warn its students not to even *mention* wikileaks online (even in a negative way) if they ever want a job in the federal government, and the military is promising to criminally prosecute US soldiers who read about it. This is a great way of filtering for a lack of curiosity and information-seeking among appplicants, which is not a great way of choosing who to hire. (Of course people will argue that someone who reads WikiLeaks cannot be trusted with secret information, but I think there is a big difference between being the one to leak information and reading about it once it already has made headlines around the world.) Basically, our government has been as stupid in its response to WikiLeaks as it was in response to 9/11.
All of this makes me more likely to want to stand up to a new emerging McCarthyism.
This sort of information suppression needs to be stopped, and I applaud the efforts of the various people involved in mirroring the data so that it does not disappear even if wikileaks goes down.
For now, Wikileaks still has a presence on Facebook and Twitter, and the evolution of this story can be followed there.
On a somewhat parallel concern, it bothers me that the Chinese government appears to be so much more successful at hacking our government's servers than we are at hacking theirs. China has been repeatedly attacking us, essentially declaring cyber-war, and we've simply been sitting there taking hits. If we wanted to level the playing field a bit, our government should secretly hire a team to hack into Chinese government servers and release the contents of those messages anonymously to WikiLeaks. I wouldn't even mind if the US government hacked into WikiLeaks and published the organization's internal email. (Unfortunately, the US government would likely not publish the information and would instead use it to hunt down its members) Turnabout is fair play, and more transparency on all sides will help make the world a better place.
In case you're not following along... the state department has pushed at least one college to warn its students not to even *mention* wikileaks online (even in a negative way) if they ever want a job in the federal government, and the military is promising to criminally prosecute US soldiers who read about it. This is a great way of filtering for a lack of curiosity and information-seeking among appplicants, which is not a great way of choosing who to hire. (Of course people will argue that someone who reads WikiLeaks cannot be trusted with secret information, but I think there is a big difference between being the one to leak information and reading about it once it already has made headlines around the world.) Basically, our government has been as stupid in its response to WikiLeaks as it was in response to 9/11.
All of this makes me more likely to want to stand up to a new emerging McCarthyism.
This sort of information suppression needs to be stopped, and I applaud the efforts of the various people involved in mirroring the data so that it does not disappear even if wikileaks goes down.
For now, Wikileaks still has a presence on Facebook and Twitter, and the evolution of this story can be followed there.
On a somewhat parallel concern, it bothers me that the Chinese government appears to be so much more successful at hacking our government's servers than we are at hacking theirs. China has been repeatedly attacking us, essentially declaring cyber-war, and we've simply been sitting there taking hits. If we wanted to level the playing field a bit, our government should secretly hire a team to hack into Chinese government servers and release the contents of those messages anonymously to WikiLeaks. I wouldn't even mind if the US government hacked into WikiLeaks and published the organization's internal email. (Unfortunately, the US government would likely not publish the information and would instead use it to hunt down its members) Turnabout is fair play, and more transparency on all sides will help make the world a better place.
Hmm
Re: Hmm
However, at this point, the US is starting to look very weak internationally, and a cyber-counterattack on China would show that the US government is not a sitting duck. Plus, China is even better at self-destructive witch hunts than the US is, so the release of news that China's government servers had been hacked would cause them a lot of internal strife. It would also lay bare a lot of their human rights abuses, which are far worse than the US's.
Re: Hmm
The US *is* counterattacking, though much more quietly. But when dealing with feisty opponents like China you have to be willing to look a bit stupid.
Any US-positive PR of this nature would have quite serious blowback, and this time not from a decentralized organization but a major state actor.
Re: Hmm
Do you have evidence for this? I'd be curious to see it.