http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/08/editorial-wikileaks-julian-assange

WikiLeaks: The man who kicked the hornet’s nest

As the disclosures continue, a number of questions about the way the world has changed are becoming more clearly framed

* Editorial
* The Guardian, Wednesday 8 December 2010

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The academic Clay Shirky has blogged persuasively this week that the US government should openly use the law against WikiLeaks and others rather than muscle. “Whatever restrictions we eventually end up enacting, we need to keep Wikileaks alive today, while we work through the process democracies always go through to react to change. If it’s OK for a democracy to just decide to run someone off the internet for doing something they wouldn’t prosecute a newspaper for doing, the idea of an internet that further democratizes the public sphere will have taken a mortal blow.” We agree.

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Several interesting points:

* The inet is not as resilient as expected. It’s supposed to route arond failures, but it’s politcially “controlled”.

* The DNS infrastructure is a single point of failure with respect to that political control.

* With this spur the creation and deployment of a peer to peer bittorrent style dns? Will everyone discard DNS in favor of “phone numbers” like 1.2.3.4? People remember 10 digit phone numbers when they need to.

* Will WIKILEAKS create a new genre of “tabloid journalism”?

* “We, The Sheeple” have gotten a real wake up call into their Gooferment and their politicians. Will it change anything?

 

 

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