A Beijing Daily op-ed argues maybe Julian Assange should win the Nobel Peace Prize. [China Media Project]:

And this brings us back to the Nobel Peace Prize. According to the decision by the Nobel Committee and the remarks of a number of other Westerners [concerning Liu Xiaobo], considering the acts of free speech in which this Assange has personally participated, opposing all on his own the "government violence" of several Western nations, could he not be regarded as a "fighter for freedom of expression"? Why don't the noble members of the Nobel Committee claim that the Peace Prize is given "in the defense of freedom of expression," and then give it to this Assange who has been persecuted, chained and jailed by the West? (Added 12/13/2010, 11:57am)

Deanna Zandt touches off a discussion about civil disobedience and denial-of-service attacks. [DeannaZandt.com]

There's a whole 'nother discussion here about power, privilege, risk and comfort when it comes to digital activism. What the short version of my feelings amounts to is that as long as we are as comfortable as we are, we won't risk anything. We have too much to lose. Thus, the question comes back to: how do I digitally throw myself in front of a tank? (Added 12/13/2010, 11:50am)

David Carr on how it's WikiLeaks that's been changed by journalism, not the other way around. [New York Times]

Notice that with each successive release, WikiLeaks has become more strategic and has been rewarded with deeper, more extensive coverage of its revelations. It's a long walk from WikiLeaks's origins as a user-edited site held in common to something more akin to a traditional model of publishing, but seems to be in keeping with its manifesto to deliver documents with "maximum possible impact." Julian Assange, WikiLeaks's founder and guiding spirit, apparently began to understand that scarcity, not ubiquity, drives coverage of events.(Added 12/13/2010, 10:30am)

Fareed Zakaria on whether WikiLeaks is actually bad for U.S. diplomacy. [TIME]

I don't deny for a moment that many of the "wikicables" are intensely embarrassing, but the sum total of the output I have read is actually quite reassuring about the way Washington -- or at least the State Department -- works. First, there is little deception. These leaks have been compared to the Pentagon papers. Which they are not. The Pentagon papers revealed that the U.S. engaged in a systematic campaign to deceive the world and the American people and that its private actions were often the opposite of its stated public policy. The WikiLeaks documents, by contrast, show Washington pursuing privately pretty much the policies it has articulated publicly. Whether on Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan or North Korea, the cables confirm what we know to be U.S. foreign policy. And often this foreign policy is concerned with broader regional security, not narrow American interests. Ambassadors are not caught pushing other countries in order to make deals secretly to strengthen the U.S., but rather to solve festering problems. (Added 12/13/2010, 10:18am)

Thomas Darnstadt provides a German perspective on the state's privacy rights. [Der Spiegel]:

There is no good or bad public sphere, just as there is no such thing as a bit of a public sphere. According to the German Constitutional Court, it is only the full- fledged ability of all citizens to have access to all information, at least in principle, which makes the formation of public opinion possible. And it is the unobstructed formation of public opinion that makes it possible to view the outcome of elections as being representative of the will of the people. Is the state permitted to keep secrets from its citizens? Are citizens permitted to disclose such secrets? The answer to both questions is very simple: Yes. (Added 12/13/2010, 10:30am)

C. Fred Alford on how WikiLeaks has changed whistle-blowing. [New York Times]

The WikiLeaks data dump challenges a long held belief by many of us who study whistle-blowing -- that it is important that the whistle-blower have a name and face so that the disclosures are not considered just anonymous griping, or possibly unethical activity. The public needs to see the human face of someone who stands up and does the right thing when none of his or her colleagues dare. WikiLeaks' release of the secret cables seems to have changed all that. There is something about the power of so much raw data that seems to take on a life of its own. One can only imagine that there will be other whistle-blowers using similar strategies. This will depend very little on the survival of WikiLeaks, but rather, the ability of the Web to make public vast amounts of data. For better and worse, this changes whistle-blowing as we've known it. (Added 12/10/2010, 12:42pm)

Zeynep Tufecki on the cables' disruption of the standard insider-outsider dynamics. [Technosociology]:



Many commentators have noted that the confidential U.S. embassy cables published by Wikileaks contain nothing that would surprise an "informed observer." I agree and have said so as much myself. However, I think this actually is the real scandal exposed by Wikileaks: there is a fairly large circle of "insiders," which include much of punditry and journalists, who have a fairly accurate picture of most issues, who nonetheless cooperate with, and in fact, make possible, the efforts of modern states to portray themselves as making decisions dictated by pure motives and high-minded principles rather than by power and interests. In my view, the potential impact of Wikileaks and similar efforts is not necessarily about leaking well-guarded secrets, which these were not; rather, it is about changing the audience for a particular discourse from insiders to outsiders. Rather than expose unknowns, I think it is more accurate to say that Wikileaks has collapsed the distinction between the "front" and "back stages" of the modern state, and exposed the gap between the day-to-day reality of modern statecraft and its civic front.(Added 12/10/2010, 11:20am)

Legendary hacker mag 2600 condemns Anonymous' denial-of-service attacks. [2600]

Denial of service attacks against PayPal, Amazon, Visa, Mastercard, and other corporations and entities have been underway for the last few days, as widely reported in the mainstream media. Each of these targets had previously taken some sort of action against the whistleblower website wikileaks.org and its affiliates. The media reports almost invariably refer to "hackers" as being behind these actions. While there is great sympathy in the hacker world for what Wikileaks is doing, this type of activity is no better than the strong-arm tactics we are fighting against. (Added 12/10/2010, 11:33am)

Bruce Schneier on WikiLeaks' role and new models for government secrecy. [Schneier.com]

This has little to do with WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks is just a website. The real story is that "least trusted person" who decided to violate his security clearance and make these cables public. In the 1970s, he would have mailed them to a newspaper. Today, he used WikiLeaks. Tomorrow, he will have his choice of a dozen similar websites. If WikiLeaks didn't exist, he could have made them available via BitTorrent... And just as the music and movie industries are going to have to change their business models for the Internet era, governments are going to have to change their secrecy models. I don't know what those new models will be, but they will be different. (Added 12/10/2010, 12:10am)

Jack Hunter on the conservative case for WikiLeaks. [The American Conservative]



Decentralizing government power, limiting it, and challenging it was the Founders' intent and these have always been core conservative principles. Conservatives should prefer an explosion of whistleblower groups like WikiLeaks to a federal government powerful enough to take them down. (Added 12/9/2010, 4:37pm)

The Economist on how the pro-WikiLeaks side in the info war organizes itself. [The Economist]

About ten people, called "OPs", are able to launch an attack. If any OP abuses his power--if he fails to heed what anons call "the hive mind" in IRC conversations-- the other OPs can lock him out of the chat. If any anon fails to be inspired by the target, she can remove her own computer from the volunteer botnet, reducing its effect. Anonymous is a 24-hour Athenian democracy, run by a quorum of whoever happens to be awake. It's hard even to define Anonymous as a "group", since not all members participate in all projects. The attempt to take down Mr Lieberman's site, for example, is part of an effort called "operation payback", a demonstration of support for Mr Assange. (Added 12/9/2010, 1:05 pm)

Evgeny Morozov on DDoS attacks as civil disobedience. [Foreign Policy]

That said, I don't think that their attacks are necessarily illegal or immoral. As long as they don't break into other people's computers, launching DDoS should not be treated as a crime by default; we have to think about the particular circumstances in which such attacks are launched and their targets. I like to think of DDoS as equivalents of sit-ins: both aim at briefly disrupting a service or an institution in order to make a point. As long as we don't criminalize all sit-ins, I don't think we should aim at criminalizing all DDoS. (Added 12/9/2010, 1:29pm)



Dave Winer on taking the war part of infowar seriously. [Scripting News]

I watch my friends root for the attackers and think this is the way wars always begin. The "fighting the good fight" spirit. Let's go over there and show them who we are. Let's make a symbolic statement. By the time the war is underway, we won't remember any of that. We will wonder how we could have been so naive to think that war was something wonderful or glorious. People don't necessarily think of wars being fought on the net and over the net, but new technology comes to war all the time, and one side often doesn't understand. (Added 12/9/2010, 2:17pm)



Louis Klarevas on why the Espionage Act needs to change in the Internet era. [The Atlantic]

The Espionage Act, which has been cited by members of Congress calling for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be prosecuted as a spy, could be loosely interpreted as making it illegal to post a link to WikiLeaks on your Facebook page. The World War I era law, intended primarily to punish government employees and contractors who pass classified information to foreign government agents, is wildly out of date. Written long before the Internet changed how information and media work, the Espionage Act is unsuited to our era and long overdue for reform. (Added 12/9/2010, 1:05 pm)



Hans Magnus Enzensberger on state secrets, from a 1964 essay on treason. [Critical Essays]

One can therefore draw two opposite conclusions...: either that everything is a state secret or that state secrets no longer exist. In a certain sense both sentences mean the same thing; the first changes into the second, but with the following result: the betrayal of such secrets is prosecuted ever more ruthlessly the more eagerly statesmen proclaim them. The absurdity of this situation is apparent; but the very delusionary character of the taboo prevents its dissolution. (Added 12/9/2010, 2:25pm)



Glenn Greenwald on a central misunderstanding of what WikiLeaks has done. [Salon]

But as of now, that they have been largely following the lead of newspapers in publishing these cables is called "reality" and "truth." That WikiLeaks just indiscriminately dumped "thousands of secret cables" is the primary U.S. Government claim being made to distinguish it from media outlets and to depict them as criminally irresponsible. Except, at least as of now, that claim is an absolute, demonstrable lie. (Added 12/9/2010, 1:47pm)



Robert Cringely points out the audacity of what WikiLeaks has done. [InfoWorld]

But, I can't stop thinking about WikiLeaks. Why? Because this is the single most important story to hit the Internet ever. It dwarfs the Drudge Report's Monica Lewinsky scoop, the Twitter anti-Tehran uprising, and even the Pam Anderson sex video. Never before has a small band of whatever-you-want-to-call-thems taken on every major nation simultaneously, twisting them into knots. But thanks to the distributed nature of the Net, they have -- and I suspect they won't be the last. (Added 12/8/2010, 9:57pm)

Johan Lagerkvist on the impact of the forgotten man in all this, Bradley Manning. [Yale Global]

The latest WikiLeaks episode reminds us that the weakest link in officialdom is the individual. This time his name was Bradley Manning. In the age of social media it takes only one disloyal or conscience-stricken employee, one skilled "hacktivist," to disseminate encrypted oceans of information, logistically impossible in pre-internet days. The diplomacy of nations has always been a highly vulnerable endeavor but, since the explosion of social and commercial networks online, there are now innumerable possibilities for renegade organizations and individuals to expose, destroy and retreat. As with the "war on terror," contestation is about powerful and hard-to-target asymmetrical relations, which is why elite politics and high-level diplomacy are under more pressure than ever. (Added 12/8/2010, 2:19pm)



Ethan Zuckerman on the Internet as a public and commercial space. [Columbia Journalism Review]

What's really hard about this is that we perceive the web to be a public space, a place where you should be able to go and set up your soapbox and say whatever you want to say to the world. The truth is, the web is almost entirely privately held. So what happens here is that we have a normative understanding that we should treat this like public space--that you should have rights to speak, that no one should constrain your rights--but then you discover that, basically, you're holding a political rally in a shopping mall. This is commercial speech, controlled by commercial rules.





Clay Shirky on what WikiLeaks means for press freedom. [cshirky.com]

The key, though, is that democracies have a process for creating such restrictions, and as a citizen it sickens me to see the US trying to take shortcuts. The leaders of Myanmar and Belarus, or Thailand and Russia, can now rightly say to us "You went after Wikileaks' domain name, their hosting provider, and even denied your citizens the ability to register protest through donations, all without a warrant and all targeting overseas entities, simply because you decided you don't like the site. If that's the way governments get to behave, we can live with that." Over the long haul, we will need new checks and balances for newly increased transparency -- Wikileaks shouldn't be able to operate as a law unto itself anymore than the US should be able to. In the short haul, though, Wikileaks is our Amsterdam. Whatever restrictions we eventually end up enacting, we need to keep Wikileaks alive today, while we work through the process democracies always go through to react to change. If it's OK for a democracy to just decide to run someone off the internet for doing something they wouldn't prosecute a newspaper for doing, the idea of an internet that further democratizes the public sphere will have taken a mortal blow.



Micah Sifry on the U.S. government's actions in the wake of Cablegate. [TechPresident]

So, while I am not 100% sure I am for everything that Wikileaks has done is and is doing, I do know that I am anti-anti-Wikileaks. The Internet makes possible a freer and more democratic culture, but only if we fight for it. And that means standing up precisely when unpopular speakers test the boundaries of free speech, and would-be censors try to create thought-crimes and intimidate the rest of us into behaving like children or sheep.



Geert Lovink and Patrice Riemens on where WikiLeaks is coming from (among other things). [Network Cultures]

WikiLeaks is also an organization deeply shaped by 1980s hacker culture, combined with the political values of techno-libertarianism that emerged in the 1990s. The fact that WikiLeaks was founded - and to a large extent is still run - by hard-core geeks is essential to understanding its values and moves. Unfortunately, this comes together with a good dose of the less savoury aspects of hacker culture. Not that idealism, the desire to contribute to making the world a better place, could be denied to WikiLeaks: on the contrary. But this brand of idealism (or, if you prefer, anarchism) is paired with a preference for conspiracies, an elitist attitude and a cult of secrecy (never mind condescension).



Jonathan Zittrain and Molly Sauter on the three phases of WikiLeaks from a dynamite FAQ on the organization. [Technology Review]

Wikileaks has moved through three phases since its founding in 2006. In its first phase, during which it released several substantial troves of documents related to Kenya in 2008, Wikileaks operated very much with a standard wiki model: the public readership could actively post and edit materials, and it had a say in the types of materials that were accepted and how such materials were vetted. The documents released in that first phase were more or less a straight dump to the Web: very little organized redacting occurred on the part of Wikileaks. Wikileaks's second phase was exemplified with the release of the "Collateral Murder" video in April 2010. The video was a highly curated, produced and packaged political statement. It was meant to illustrate a political point of view, not merely to inform. The third phase is the one we currently see with the release of the diplomatic cables: Wikileaks working in close conjunction with a select group of news organizations to analyze, redact and release the cables in a curated manner, rather than dumping them on the Internet or using them to illustrate a singular political point of view. (Added 12/9/2010, 4:37pm)

Nikil Saval on the relationship between information and politics. [n+1]

The secrets remain the problem--they convert even honest public servants, newly enthralled with what they're able to occlude, into sycophants and liars. But having secrets out in the open doesn't automatically give us politics... Let's remember that information is not yet knowledge--it's only the object of knowledge. Information sits mute, inert, intransigent, until we begin to imagine better and to ask the right questions. The WikiLeaks documents offer us another opportunity to consider what kind of government, what kind of politics, we have, and to imagine what kind, if any, we would want instead. (Added 12/9/2010, 4:48 pm)

The Economist on WikiLeaks' downsides. [The Economist]

But any gains will come at a high cost. In a world of WikiLeaks, diplomacy would no longer be possible. The secrecy that WikiLeaks despises is vital to all organisations, including government--and especially in the realm of international relations. Those who pass information to American diplomats, out of self-interest, conviction or goodwill, will be less open now. Some of them, like the Iranian businessman fingered as a friend of America, could face reprisals.

Taiwanese cartoon news animators provide a hilarious, but good video explainer. [NMA.tv]