Manning Up!
My sympathies have grown for Julian Assange over the past few weeks, and somewhat by transitivity for Bradley Manning. They seem to have mainly released "secrets" that many members of the ruling classes around the world are sex addicts, embezzlers, or afraid of nuclear armed Iranian theocrats. (So they aren't all bad!) They grew more when I learned that they are using police power against Assange, NOT because his publication of these secrets broke a law, but because he "raped" some of his own fans in Sweden -- and then it turns out that "rape" there in bizarro world PC Scandanavia means continuing to have sex after a condom breaks and not getting an STD test when your former (and seemingly stalkerish) sex partner demands you take one.
So I am coming to agree with Congressman Ron Paul that rather than shutting down WikiLeaks what we need are: fewer things classified as secret; fewer people with security clearances; fewer incompetent administrations that do not guard secrets well; and a WikiFed or WikiObama or WikiCongress to release all the hidden machinations of the Federal Reserve System and the Congress and White House.
Currently governments are trying to shut down WikiLeaks and many sites are offering to mirror WikiLeaks and keep the documents published on the internet. Here is my proposal.
In the past some SETI related project hosted at Berkeley had this software you could download on your PC that used your CPU when you were not using it, to process signals recorded from radio telescopes and look for patterns to find intelligent life. I had it downloaded on my old PC and it produced a fun screen saver showing bar graphs and such of its own progress as it processed the interstellar noise.
I wonder if any of our libertarian cyber mavens can make a version of this for us all to host WikiLeaks.
Though many of the points about how the real crime here is the failure of the U.S. government to manage its own secrets have been made by various pundits, some otherwise usually trenchant news commentators have gone off the deep end. My sometime heroine Ann Coulter wrote a column in which the WikiLeaks affair is seen mainly through the lens of Bradley Manning's homosexuality (Ms. Coulter goes on to list the many homosexual spies and traitors in Anglo-American history, though she stops short of proving that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg's marriage was just for show.) I guess we can let Ann have a pass on this one; after all, it was likely that time of the month.
But to follow Ms. Coulter's provocation, let's just be as gay as possible, and use as our guiding metaphor the series finale ol "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer" where Willow (Alyson Hannigan) invokes the Goddess and casts a spell that makes all girls who are potential slayers into real Slayers simultaneously, so there is no longer only "one (who) into each generation is born."
Technologically empowered decentralization and transparency. So one of you do it or I will be forced to call ITT and go back to school.
Additionally, I think all those libertarians and others with BAs and MAs in economics and statistics and such should Manning Up and burrow in as moles, taking jobs at the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, the IMF etc. And then grab documents and make them public. Let there be an army of Slayers.
Last weekend I listened to Monica Crowley on the radio observe that the administrations (like Obama's) than can't manage their secrets are a more serious problem than Bradley Manning's disloyalty to his employer (and such disloyalty must be viewed in the context of whether the employer was committing crimes). This week Rush Limbaugh observed that the Leftovers were calling Assange a whistle blower until he embarrassed Hillary and Obama, and now he is a terrorist instead.
(Maybe some software millionaire will fund this?)
Notes
The distributed software I have seen is: http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/
The most generic version is http://freenetproject.org/
Julian Assange is interviewed athttp://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2010/11/29/an-interview-with-wikileaks-julian-assange/
The fabricated nature of the rape charges against Assange is discussed athttp://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/swedens-reputation-is-on-trial-in-julian-assange-case/story-e6frfhqf-1225965772832
Glen Greenwald's background on Bradley Manning's document theft is athttp://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/06/18/wikileaks/index.html
Ann Coulter's extended imploding/boomeranging homophobic joke is at http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=40325
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