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Wikileaks
Is Wikileaks only about leaks of big government issues? No. Does it have direct relevance to ITP? Yes.
Many of the leaked documents on Wikileaks are concerned with medical issues. For example, ex-actor Jeni Barnett of LBC, recently hosted a rant on the radio about MMR, she raged about conspiracies and doctor's lies about MMR, ignoring all evidence. As a challenge, several websites put the recorded programme up for open access along with reasoned discussion of the evidence. LBC's lawyers tried to get them removed claiming breach of copyright, so in efforts to avoid litigation, copies were sent to Wikileaks, an organisation that is hard to prosecute, as we have seen.
Wikileaks has been very much in the news recently but many will perhaps not have actually looked at it, feeling that the daily business of world politics, war and government corruption is not for them. But you should look at it, there is much of relevance to us all. I do not suppose that powerful people will rest until it is shut down, they have much to lose as we have seen, but as many such people are not very savvy when it comes to technology, perhaps they do not realise that the genie is already out of the bottle. In an effort to keep all the leaked material in the public domain, Wikileaks have already released all of the content ready for archiving. As there are already many copies of this archive around the world, outraged governments such as that of the USA are far too late. Even if they stop the internet itself, CDs and DVDs go around the world by the old fashioned postal service.
We all saw the outraged news coverage of Chinese censorship of the internet but many are not so aware of similar efforts by more "civilised" countries. Kevin Rudd, the one-time PM of Australia wanted to censor the net to "protect the children" but Wikileaks published the list of his banned sites. Naturally, it covers a lot more than mere porn, some of the banned sites show details that his government finds embarrassing. In the UK, Communications Minister Ed Vaizey is trying to "protect children from being exposed to pornography", by getting each ISP to do the censoring. Porn is always used as the excuse for censorship but the real reasons are more serious as Wikileaks has shown. In concert with the USA, the UK government will be quite happy to keep us all ignorant of some of their dealings. In a censored environment one never finds out what has been censored (unless you look on Wikileaks!).
As I write this in January, putting www.wikileaks.com into the address bar gives "Sorry! This site is not currently available." This is all part of a concerted effort to stop access to the site they all fear but there are several copies around the world. The German one recently stopped working owing to government action. As it says on mirror.wikileaks.info, "The action comes two weeks after the house of the German WikiLeaks domain sponsor, Theodor Reppe, was searched by German authorities. Police documentation shows that the March 24, 2009 raid was triggered by WikiLeaks' publication of Australia's proposed secret internet censorship list. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) told Australian journalists that they did not request the intervention of the German government.". Do we believe them? I don't.
A brief techie note may be of help. All addresses (or Domain Names) on the net such as bbc.co.uk are for human ease of use, the net actually operates on a numbered address for each site called an IP address. (IP=Internet Protocol) A service that translates one to the other is called a DNS or Domain Name Service, so when you type wikileaks.info into your address bar, the DNS translates that to the actual IP address of 213.251.145.96 and that is what is sent down the line and calls up the website. If an organisation withdraws the DNS, simply typing 213.251.145.96 into the address bar will give you Wikileaks. That will work for any website where you know the IP address but that aspect of the net is usually ignored by all except the techies. For sites that may attract a lot of traffic, it is common practice to have several "mirror" sites, so if one is busy you can try one of the mirrors. Wikileaks have this arrangement, mirrors are hosted in different countries so no one government can stop them all at once. See www.wikileaks.info.
As Wikileaks has been in the news so much it is often overloaded, even with mirrors. It is worth the effort to look, if at first you don't get to see it, try again. You may be amazed at what you see.
Happy (uncensored) surfing.
Howard