Wiki What?
A long time ago I came upon thesmokinggun.com and over the years frequented the site for leaked documents pertaining to MLB steroids investigations and the Wesley Snipes tax evasion files. I believe most of the intriguing documents found on the site are not truly public record although most of the content comes from court cases and are probably domain. The Internet had an other sources actively posting documents online, of varying degrees of importance.
Enter "Wiki Leaks" and a larger scandal about posting documents online. The content of the material posted is different, but precedent established online years prior to recent events. On a significantly smaller scale, sites like deadspin.com and gawker.com developed a logic that went something along the lines of 'if I do not post this material someone else will so I might as well verify accuracy and post since the content ends up online anyway' for documents and articles that should rightfully remain far from public domain. Wikipedia is not far removed in theory, but operationally functions far differently because although any can contribute content, anyone can take content off just as easily. When I first learned of the Leaks story I mistakenly thought it was a site operated by hackers, but it is not. The site took information from hackers in a similar way to how traditional journalists acquire inside information from sources.
The primary difference seems not the website functionality nor philosophy, but rather the targets selected. The recent controversy involves classified documents that span diplomacy across continents. Clearly the revealing documents about nuclear powers are more important than the trivial anecdotes revealed on other sites. However, the technology already evolved amazing resilience to evade authorities who want to shut down the site. The easiest evasion is to build a new website. There are thousands of servers to host websites on multiple continents. Another tactic is to evolve mirror sites that copy content. As I write this blog post there are 2,194 mirror sites for Leaks, which demonstrates how easily this strategy can be done and how difficult eliminating mirror sites can be. In this case the highly publicized censorship efforts attracted many sympathizers and expanded the number of mirror sites significantly beyond what most normally mirrored sites attract (typically open source software sites maintaining duplication to assure no loss of technology).
Which brings me to my point: Leaks is a non-factor if not reported in the mainstream media. Whatever was done wrong only gained fame specifically from the reporting drawing attention to the site. This motivates others to replicate similar strategies, I feel the role of the traditional press gets overlooked. If the New York Times publishes the same reports posted on the Leaks site, they perform no more nor less service and deserve the same treatment. I would argue respected media outlets like the NY Times perform the greater crime because of the reputation and much larger readership.
Enter "Wiki Leaks" and a larger scandal about posting documents online. The content of the material posted is different, but precedent established online years prior to recent events. On a significantly smaller scale, sites like deadspin.com and gawker.com developed a logic that went something along the lines of 'if I do not post this material someone else will so I might as well verify accuracy and post since the content ends up online anyway' for documents and articles that should rightfully remain far from public domain. Wikipedia is not far removed in theory, but operationally functions far differently because although any can contribute content, anyone can take content off just as easily. When I first learned of the Leaks story I mistakenly thought it was a site operated by hackers, but it is not. The site took information from hackers in a similar way to how traditional journalists acquire inside information from sources.
The primary difference seems not the website functionality nor philosophy, but rather the targets selected. The recent controversy involves classified documents that span diplomacy across continents. Clearly the revealing documents about nuclear powers are more important than the trivial anecdotes revealed on other sites. However, the technology already evolved amazing resilience to evade authorities who want to shut down the site. The easiest evasion is to build a new website. There are thousands of servers to host websites on multiple continents. Another tactic is to evolve mirror sites that copy content. As I write this blog post there are 2,194 mirror sites for Leaks, which demonstrates how easily this strategy can be done and how difficult eliminating mirror sites can be. In this case the highly publicized censorship efforts attracted many sympathizers and expanded the number of mirror sites significantly beyond what most normally mirrored sites attract (typically open source software sites maintaining duplication to assure no loss of technology).
Which brings me to my point: Leaks is a non-factor if not reported in the mainstream media. Whatever was done wrong only gained fame specifically from the reporting drawing attention to the site. This motivates others to replicate similar strategies, I feel the role of the traditional press gets overlooked. If the New York Times publishes the same reports posted on the Leaks site, they perform no more nor less service and deserve the same treatment. I would argue respected media outlets like the NY Times perform the greater crime because of the reputation and much larger readership.
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