Given that Julian Assange's latest Wikileaks releases have occupied the headlines for the past few days, I felt obliged to scribble a few lines on the subject. These may not be original, but they are after all, my lines!
I am in a bit of a quandary on this one; I recently wrote a piece saying that Politics can be confusing and I am little muddled over Wikileaks. On the face of it, the idea of nasty dealings by governments and politicians being released is most attractive; after all why should these bastards get away with it, I thought to myself.
Today's news (Daily Telegraph) about the list of locations which are vital to the interests of the USA, made me pause for further thought.
Given that Amazon and Paypal have allegedly given in to US Government pressure to cease assisting Wikileaks, I am concerned that provocations such as those provided by Wikileaks could perhaps lead to Internet restrictions, which of course none of us wants.
After all, would you bloggers out there like to operate under the Chinese Government's censorious régime? Remember Google's experience last year... Of course we like to console ourselves with the classic thought "It couldn't happen here," but a few minutes' reflection on the already terrifying extent of the curtailment of our personal freedoms in Western Europe should be enough to tell that indeed it could!
The Telegraph article linked to above includes the following paragraph:
WikiLeaks has already been forced to change its domain name and hop-scotch to servers around the globe after successive companies and countries have responded to American pressure attacking its disclosures over the past week as illegal.
It has also come under repeated cyber-attack, through a tactic known as distributed denial of service in which thousands of computers connect to its servers in a concerted attempt to knock them off-line.
“What we are seeing here are dangerous moves towards a digital McCarthyism,” wrote the group’s founder Julian Assange in a statement on its website.
UPDATE:
P.S. Normally I would add updates in a different colour, but once again HTM 'Ell refuses to let me do so...
Until the next time.
2 comments:
Seems some enterprising hackers took down Swiss Postbanks site in revenge, we live in interesting times.
Does anyone really bealieve that resurecting the Swedish sex charges against Assange is anything other than a CIA plot to restrict his movement?
Interesting times indeed.
The Swiss Postbank stated that Assange had claimed to be resident in Switzerland which he is not. If this is true, then I suppose Postbank cannot really be criticised. Perhaps Assange had anticipated a favourable outcome from his application for Swiss residency?
As for the Swedish sex charges, this does seem a bit smelly to me.
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