[LINK] How wikileaks was an inevitable result of the internet

[Frank O'Connor]

At 2:03 PM +1100 18/12/10, David Boxall wrote:
>On 18/12/2010 11:49 AM, Tom Worthington wrote:
>>>  At 08:46 AM 17/12/2010, Kim Holburn wrote:
>>>>>  But what really matters is that the disruptive power of the
>>>>  internet has been conclusively demonstrated ...
>>
>>  I don't see that Wikileaks has much to do with the Internet.
>>
>The Internet made Wikileaks easier to organise and, more importantly,
>publicise.

Mmm ... newspapers and broadcast media are just that ... broadcast 
from a single source. The internet on the other hand is a demand 
driven media ... where consumers can flit and snuffle amongst 
articles, ideas, information and the like to their heart's content. 
Traditional journalists counter that there is little or no vetting of 
information on the Internet, and that sources can't be trusted - but 
I have more distrust nowadays of traditional media than I have of 
what I read on the Net.

Aside from this ... Wikileaks and sources like it are great for raw 
information uncontaminated by editing and opinion. The only thing you 
have to be wary of is that you should appreciate that every source 
comes with its own bias.

By way of illustration, the current 'body parts in Kosovo' news being 
reported in the media at the moment seems to come from a number of 
agenda pushing individuals, organisations and nations that I wouldn't 
trust farther than I could throw them ... but this is reported as 
fact by various 'reputable' media organisations. Without ANY concrete 
evidence. So, are the conventional media doing their job anyway?

>
>>  What seems to have happened is that someone, most likely a US government
>>  employee, copied a large number of low classification US government
>>  documents. They most likely used a writeable media, such as a CD-ROM to
>>  do this, not the Internet. They then apparently gave that information to
>>  someone who has been distributing it to newspaper journalists. The
>>  newspaper journalists have been quoting the material in newspapers.
>>
>As I understand it, information was copied to CD-ROMs. It was then sent
>to Wikileaks, whether electronically or physically isn't clear. Once the
>information was outside a supposedly secure environment, uploading it is
>as feasible as delivering the disks.

DVD was, I think, the copy media. And you can whack a heap of text 
onto a DVD, as the US found out. Only 1.6 gigabytes in the entire 
State Department message archive ... which could have been copied to 
a DVD three times over. Taking the physical product, or photographing 
it or whatever analogue method you decided on would have been next to 
impossible.

As a security measure they should start using video mail ... then 
only a tiny fraction of what was lost in this incident would be lost 
in future incidents of digital copying. (Of course DVD is only 4.2 
gigabytes, or 8.4 gigabytes double density, Blue Ray starts at 50 
gigabytes and goes to about 150GB ... and external hard drives, flash 
drives and the like offer extensively more. You could whack the whole 
State Department archives on some of those puppies rather than just 
selected stuff.

So yeah ... the media and mode of copying does matter.

>
>>  Copies of the source documents are placed on the web, after the details
>>  have been reported in the newspaper. But most people are not reading the
>>  documents on the Internet, they are reading newspaper reports of them.
>>  None of this depends on the use of the Internet.
>>
>Wikileaks distributes files to five news organisations. Those
>organisations decide what to publish, when, and what to redact. The US
>Department of State was given the opportunity to redact the files, but
>declined. Wikileaks publishes what the five publish, after they do.

And why not do it that way. The fact that most people are interested 
only in what the traditional media release isn't helping the US 
Government put a lid on this. Indeed the fact that the information is 
spawning from one Web site to another must surely give the relevant 
security agencies pause ... what had been a damage limitation problem 
with Wikileaks and 5 newspapers involved has now become a nightmare 
with the original six agents now supplemented by hundreds of other 
sites and agencies holding copies of the relevant data. And hundreds 
of thousands of copies downloaded onto clients around the Net.

If I was someone who was approving funding for the security agencies 
concerned, I'd seriously question whether or not it was better just 
to let the agencies fold given the incompetence they've shown - both 
now and over the last 20 years on other security issues and problems. 
The better solution would have been to simply accept the leak, nail 
the source that leaked it ... and try and get on with life. But they 
decided to give the whole thing more attention and Wikileaks more 
gravitas than any of the leaks I have seen so far merit. The 
intelligence chiefs, the police chiefs, the military chiefs, the 
movers and shakers in the NSA and the State department... they are 
the ones who the US should prosecute.

>
>>  In the pre-Internet days to leak government documents, usually with
>>  government approval, the procedure was to pass photocopies in an
>>  envelope. Manuka shops was a typical location for this activity in
>>  Canberra:<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuka,_Canberra#Shops>.
>>  Using CD-ROMs, flash drives, or even the Internet, does not change this
>>  much.
>>
>It has a substantial impact on the volume and ease of copying and
>distribution.
>
>>  The currently leaked documents do not contain much we did not know
>>  before. That some politicians have character flaws is hardly a state
>>  secret. These appear to be low classification documents, which perhaps
>>  should not have been available to so many people in government, but do
>>  little more than cause some embarrassment.
>>
>According to one US security source, the leak has done more good than
>harm. To my mind, the way Wikileaks has handled the information is a
>model of responsibility.
>
>That begs the question: what happens if Wikileaks goes? If the US
>succeeds in killing the messenger, my feeling is that they will regret
>it deeply.

Wikileaks and Assange aren't saints. Indeed I think I'd have a lot of 
trouble liking Assange ... he seems to be a somewhat narcissistic, 
ascetic, 'I am holier than thou', arrogant and abrasive individual 
who leaves a trail of human wreckage wherever he goes, a self centred 
user of others in pursuit of his own narrow goals, and given to 
highly politicised causes with a very selective group of what he sees 
as adversaries. In short, I don't think he's very likeable at all.

That said, I think the world is a better place with Wikileaks than without it.