In a weird sneaker-net way we have implemented a human DNS
scripting.com
scripting.com
What's really working both ways here is the samizdat analogy. Wikileaks is the next logical step after samizdat in the fight against tyranny.
The reason they were overruled was because 9/11 in particular showed how badly joined up the information services were. Now the pendulum will swing the other way again, inevitably.
I'm not yet convinced this a great outcome. Shouldn't diplomatic staff be able to send back accurate assessments of political figures in countries where the US has interests? If internal comms are sanitised for potential public exposure, who benefits?
The "taking on tyranny" rhetoric surrounding wikileaks is overheated, too. Assange is taking on the softest Western governments; the ones who will go after him with arrest warrants. Were he actually to take on tyranny he knows he'd end up in a London clinic with radiation poisoning.
Why do you think Wikileaks is only about the US? Right now the cables leaked out are from the US, but the point is to do this to every government. Everyone opposed to statism and nationalism benefits.
"Were he actually to take on tyranny he knows he'd end up in a London clinic with radiation poisoning."
Except Litvinenko wasn't interested in revealing state secrets, but in making schemes with Russian oligarchs. Which is probably why he's the only Soviet or Russian defector to have died under suspicious circumstances since 1959.
I think a dog only barks because that's all I've heard it do. I think you're choosing a "point" that chimes with your hopes, not the facts.
Your "benefits" too need made more explicit. I'm opposed to nationalism and don't see any short or long-term benefits for me, here. Doing actions contrary to the welfare of a national state doesn't automatically amount to a benefit for anti-nationalists.
On the contrary, there are serious questions to be asked about what this will do to things that actively help nations to work together, such as diplomatic backchannels. Severing those is no more laudable, and far more potentially lethal, than when TC posted Twitter's internal emails.
As for 1959, your answer's a little fine in its splitting of the hair -- the KGB went after plenty in its time, including assisting in the bizarre murder of Markov, and the "suicide" of Shevchenko's wife. There were also the many sentenced to death that had to be hidden by the CIA. Lets not start on the Stasi, either.
If your point was that tyrannies don't murder their citizens for treason, you'll have a tough sell. That's why actually taking them on is a lot harder than taking on a government that -- as the cables are showing -- is actually relatively close to plain-speaking in its dealing with other nations. A lot of the embarrassment has come from second-hand revelations about what other countries have been lying about.
I don't know if you've seen this already, but this summarizes Assange's views well: http://zunguzungu.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/julian-assange-an...
"I'm opposed to nationalism and don't see any short or long-term benefits for me, here."
I see a lot of potential benefits for people currently being murdered in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"On the contrary, there are serious questions to be asked about what this will do to things that actively help nations to work together, such as diplomatic backchannels."
Nations working together towards what? The whole point is that nations work together for the benefit of those governing them. The only reason you and I aren't property of god-kings at this point in history is because in the past people have resisted tribal/nationalist/statist power.
"As for 1959, your answer's a little fine in its splitting of the hair -- the KGB went after plenty in its time, including assisting in the bizarre murder of Markov, and the "suicide" of Shevchenko's wife. There were also the many sentenced to death that had to be hidden by the CIA. Lets not start on the Stasi, either."
Do you think Africa is a country? How is it splitting hairs to be aware that "Eastern Europe" isn't a single place?
"If your point was that tyrannies don't murder their citizens for treason, you'll have a tough sell."
Every country punishes its citizens for treason. Assange isn't a citizen of the United States. Bradley Manning is.
1. Expose internal documents. 2. ???? 3. Fewer people being murdered in Iraq.
Going to need to spell out 2 here, because nothing wikileaks has done so far has done anything to stop those deaths, and isn't likely to. Assange's, yours and Winer's stances all assume that the states involved won't change their methods in response to informational insecurity, and will instead continue business as usual. This is a strange assumption.
"Do you think Africa is a country? How is it splitting hairs to be aware that "Eastern Europe" isn't a single place?"
It was you who took my allusion to Litvinenko and turned into it something exclusively exclusively about Russia. My point was, and remains, that tyrannies murder to protect themselves, and high-minded rhetoric about bringing them down comes to naught when you just pick on the soft targets.
Please read Assange's manifesto, I posted the link for a reason. The whole point of Wikileaks is to force states to "change their methods in response to informational insecurity" and make their functioning less efficient. Armed revolution isn't popular these days, and this is a bloodless, scalable, and morally unassailable (well, for normal people's morals, anyway) way to attack the functioning of a government.
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Also, I just learned about this: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/03/wikileaks-cables-rev.ht...
Let's see what the outcome will be.
As for "morally unassailable", that's a ridiculous assertion. HN can't even decide whether or not TechCrunch was right to publish the Twitter emails; this is at a much more morally complicated level. The potential to put people in harm's way is being used by politicians as a stick to beat WikiLeaks, but nonetheless there's something to it.
When Amnesty International says you're putting people in danger, there's more than just hype to it.
I can't help but think how nice it'd be if all the taxpayer funded diplomats could hold their heads high and say "Yes, what Wikileaks just published was my professional communication as a trained diplomat. the opinions expressed were my opinions and I stand behind them."
There are times when I may have turned to a coworker and said "this client is STUPID!", but in any written correspondence that would have come out as "there seems to be a misunderstanding on their part" or "perhaps we need to be dealing with someone at the client with a higher level of technical understanding", surely that sort of diplomatic communications is what diplomats are trained and paid to do?
And if their servers are shut down, create checksummed files released into the bittorrent cloud.
Eventually this will either end sanely, or in another Great Firewall.
(everydns.net is the dns service they are using)
Seriously? Is there some memo addressing this self-evident truth that I missed? What Amazon did was politically expedient. That doesn't mean they didn't take sides.
I would also point out that large service hosts also have a vested interest in resisting government intrusions, because it's bad for Amazon to have a reputation of trashing your service every time some government somewhere burbles something to them. Exactly how "expedient" this is overall is actually a tricky thing to judge and the evidence isn't all one-sided. Again, I don't have enough information to judge.
And of course as cryptoz pointed out, there's no shortage of trackers to use. If more are needed, it would be cheap and easy to make a few yourself, opentracker should use almost no resources.
I doubt that's all of it.
There is also a torrent of the "insurance" file, but no-one (publicly) knows what that contains.
$ openssl enc -d -aes256 -in insurance.aes256 > out.dec
use ONION as password.
I didn't try it.