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Saturday, December 4, 2010

Cablegate

What is the significance of Wikileaks Cablegate?
First of all, the cables are marked 'secret' or 'non-foreigners' and where/are accessible by about 3 million US government employees. And all of them would have been released to the public in less than 20 years from now.
The cat and mouse game on keeping wikileaks.org running are in full swing. Amazon dropped hosting a single HTML page that explains how to get to the cables and other files, due to pressure from the US government. The DNS server dropped their entries from wikileaks.org to, for instance, http://88.80.13.160 (old 2008 IP address, server not loading)
This is stiffening access, but currently there is a swiss server, a Dutch, German and Finnish  domain name up and running. There are also dozens of mirror sites, like indymedia.org and The NYTimes keeps us updated with The Lede's blog. Besides that, NYTimes, The Gardian and other newspapers already have the full cables and that's where the juicy news came from in the first place.
The public had to do with information about Iran on the first and second day. Now it seems it will publicise from different embassies every day.
It worried me that it started off with cables about arms deals with Iran and other cables concerning mostly Iran. Was wikileaks a tool to ramp up the public for yet another war?
Still not sure about that yet. I stay with the old saying that if you make something illegal people will try harder to get it. So in the events around wikileaks it seems we are focussing more and more on it and will try harder to get the information.

What is more worrying is the man hunt after Assange and the cyberhunt to shut down the servers, that are based worldwide.
When advisers and would be president candidates start calling (and later apologizing) to assasinate Assange on this relatively unimportant data, we are made to fear our governments more and more.

What worries me the most is that this is accelerating the changes that our world governments want about the internet. Paygates, greater control of what is available on the internet and more. China is a prime example on how it deals with the internet and could end up in a template for the whole internet.
The internet is basically the 8th continent of the world, a place where you do not need a visa and can travel to instantly. Having companies restricting it, or worse: governments that limit it, will take this continent out of the hands of the people and into another tool for mass media, controlling what we should be informed of, and what we are allowed to see.
Already the big media companies are controlling what we see and what we are being informed. They are owned by only a few companies. If you see that Comcast, the US biggest internet provider, wants a piece of NBC that is owned by General Electric, you know what direction this is going. Comcast is not interested in Net Neutrality and thinks that issue should be scrapped from the senates agenda, leaving it to the corporations.  We all know what that did to banking.
This month the FCC asked to get Obama's Net Neutrality promise for a vote, just before christmas. Same as what happened in 1913, just before christmas.... Less congressmen, better chance of getting the vote on. And the plans don't look like how Obama envisioned it.