{"id":2967,"date":"2010-12-03T14:03:14","date_gmt":"2010-12-03T19:03:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/?p=2967"},"modified":"2010-12-03T14:24:46","modified_gmt":"2010-12-03T19:24:46","slug":"government-plays-whac-a-mole-with-wikileaks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2010\/12\/government-plays-whac-a-mole-with-wikileaks.html","title":{"rendered":"Government plays Whac-a-Mole with Wikileaks"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Whac-a-Mole\"<\/a>
You can't keep a good mole down (Photo by Robert Dobalina on Flickr)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the ongoing debacle over the release of State Department cables, the government is yet again demonstrating they really have no idea how the Internet works.\u00a0 Apparently, Sen. Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens<\/a> really was the technical wizard in Washington.<\/p>\n

While the government’s embarrassment over the publication of the documents is certainly understandable, it’s response is anything but.\u00a0 There have been repeated calls by politicians and pundits to prosecute Wikileaks and\/or it’s founder Julian Assange.\u00a0 Sen. Diana Feinstein wants to prosecute on charges of espionage<\/a>.\u00a0 (That’s at least plausible as opposed to calls from the likes of Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin, and Mike Huckabee that this is somehow treason or terrorism.)\u00a0 Yet, everyone seems to keep overlooking that all Wikileaks did was publish<\/em> the documents.\u00a0 They didn’t steal them.\u00a0 They didn’t aid or abet the theft.\u00a0 They may have been the first to publish, but the desire to prosecute them stems from a woefully misguided notion that if Wikileaks hadn’t done what they did, these documents never would have seen the light of day.\u00a0 That’s sheer sophistry. In a day and age where everyone can publish anything on the Internet, someone somewhere would have put these documents online.\u00a0 PFC Bradly Manning<\/a>, awaiting trial for stealing the documents, could have found any number of willing publishers, hackers, or tech-savvy malcontents to publish his booty, or even uploaded them himself.\u00a0 Wikileaks may have been the vehicle, but they weren’t the cause.<\/p>\n

Further, if publishing alone constitutes a crime, then at this point shouldn’t the NY Times, CNN, and practically every other news organization on the planet be in trouble?\u00a0 They’ve all republished bits and pieces of the stolen information.<\/p>\n

But that horse has left the barn.\u00a0 The documents have already been dumped to the web.\u00a0 In response, Sen. Joe Lieberman has been pressuring<\/a> hosting sites like Amazon who were acting as one of several worldwide servers hosting the Wikileaks website.\u00a0 Amazon has since relented and taken the content off of their servers.\u00a0 The company Tableau Software was providing analysis and visualzations of the Wikileaks data dump.\u00a0 They too have been persuaded to take down their content.\u00a0 None of these moves have been more than annoyances.\u00a0 Wikileaks data is spread across servers all over the international web at this point.\u00a0 There’s no useful way to scrub it all off.<\/p>\n

Earlier today, the government pressured the US based DNS provider<\/a> for Wikileaks to disable the wikileaks.org domain name.\u00a0 This made it difficult to find the website for several minutes until the direct IP addresses of the servers were posted widely.\u00a0 Within 6 hours, the site emerged with the new Swiss domain name wikileaks.ch.<\/p>\n

The net, by its very nature, is highly connected, highly redundant, and not under any one country or company’s control.\u00a0 Ask any starlet who’s tried to get her nude pictures down off the web.\u00a0 You can try and whack every site they pop up on, but ultimately you just draw more and more attention to the pictures and insure they will haunt you forever.\u00a0 This is no different.\u00a0 The State Department cables have been cached, copied, and spidered countless times by servers and users all over the world.\u00a0 You can even go here to download your own copy<\/a> of the Wikileaks website so you too can put it online, or just have a look about.<\/p>\n

As Sally told Harry all those years ago, “You can’t take it back…\u00a0 Because it’s already out there.”<\/p>\n

Anyone who’s played the arcade game Whac-a-Mole can tell you, playing makes a lot of noise and tends to draw a crowd of onlookers anxious to see you make a fool of yourself.\u00a0 At this point, all the government can do is stop drawing attention by whacking the little critters.\u00a0 It just encourages them.\u00a0 Eventually, it will blow over.<\/p>\n

Oh, and they might want to upgrade their security procedures to prevent any Lady Gaga CDs<\/a> from getting into secure areas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Playing makes a lot of noise and tends to draw a crowd of onlookers anxious to see you make a fool of yourself. As Sally told Harry all those years ago, “You can’t take it back… Because it’s already out there.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,3],"tags":[73,70,72,69],"class_list":["post-2967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-madscience","category-politics","tag-censorship","tag-free-press","tag-internet","tag-wikileaks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2967"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2983,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2967\/revisions\/2983"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}