December 11, 2010 12:38 AM UTC

Merry Wikimas

• 0 Comments
• by: JO

In the latest chapter:

WikiLeaks supporters on Friday downloaded increasing amounts of the spam-shooting software used to attack companies seen as hostile – a development that could challenge even Internet giants such as PayPal and Amazon.com during the crucial Christmas shopping season. (AP) http://www.nytimes.com/aponlin…

Cyber guerrilla warfare? One possible description in a mounting conflict that includes on the other side a disinformation campaign by GOTUS, to say nothing of unproved “rape” charges filed, unfiled, and refiled by prosecutors in Sweden.

Example: WikiLeaks has put American lives in jeopardy by making public sensitive, secret documents. Of course, there are no examples provided of instances, or even a single instance, of a life being in jeopardy, much less any “blood on their hands.” Less known, I believe, is that WikiLeaks has never (to my knowledge) released any document marked Top Secret. The WikiLeaks release has not been indiscriminate; so far as we know, the documents have been vetted before being made public; all three of the most notorious WikiLeaks releases have come from Siprnet, which was specifically designed to facilitate different branches of the GOTUS to share information with lower security classifications, of which “secret” is the top. Top secret information, such as battle plans, are not distributed via Siprnet and have not been released by WikiLeaks.

Example: In the third release, of State Department cables, WikiLeaks made public about a quarter million documents. Fact: The latest number that I saw of documents actually released was under 2,000, from a cache (supposedly) of 250,000. These documents were released beforehand to credible news organizations, which themselves have not published the actual documents–just stories about the documents. Embarassing? Maybe. But not as embarrassing as the campaign to discredit WikiLeaks and its founder/editor/dickhead-in-chief (nod to SSG Dan, and also to introduce vocab judged appropriate to this site), Julian Assange.

Example: The government of China in particular is to be condemned, has been condemned, for interfering with the free flow of information over the Internet when that information reflects badly on the government of China. Government should be transparent. Well, foreign government should be transparent. There are limits, you know, and they begin where the ocean ends.

And then we have the cases of Amazon.com, PayPal, MasterbCard, Visa, and the Swiss postal bank, to which list we should add Senator Joe Lieberman (or, if that proves embarrassing in the future, a member of Senator Joe Lieberman’s staff) who mentioned to Amazon.com that offering its computer hosting facilities to WikiLeaks just might be the subject of future inquiry by the United States Senate–and, hide under your beds kiddies, the F-B-I.

All of which has been followed by the widespread downloading of DNS attack software. How long can it be before the word “terrorism” is introduced to the conversation, if “rape” doesn’t do the job? Who will be the first? Fox? Limbaugh? Beck? “Wasilla: Techosophisticate Sarah Palin today denounced cyberterrorists who…”

Cyberwarfare, including cyber guerrilla warfare, has its parallels in, say, iTunes. Let the people decide what’s public and what’s not; let the people decide which songs they want to buy and which not. The WikiLeaks saga has quickly expanded into a much larger phenomenon: who will control what information is made available on the internet? The governments in Beijing and Washington, plus the governing boards of Amazon and–who knows whether? who knows when? — the board of Comcast and other friendly internet service providers?

Or We the Wiki?

To be continued…on and on and on.