On Sun, 28 Nov 2010, Tyler Durden wrote:
John Young mourned the death of crypto and cypherpunks, but here we are precisely in a situation in which a government couldn't bomb or assassinate or otherwise throw some jackbooted tantrum or threat in order to get its' way.
It's cute too that, just like "rendition", Assange and Wikileaks operate in a nebulous amalgam of jurisdictions. Is it illegal for them to do what they did? In which country? OK, what about another country and its' mirror sites? And could they shut down the TOR networks and other means by which the info-dumps are received and transmitted? No, this cat is out of the bag. Hopefully Assange is smart enough to have established dead-man protocols, also.
Everything that wikileaks has accomplished could have been done completely anonymously, with the public never having heard the name Assange. If you are optimizing for leaks, you don't put yourself out there. The fact that we know his name shows that he is optimizing for something else. If the government really wanted to shut Assange up, they would give him a record deal or a starring role in a hollywood film.