Fuck 'em. We won, plain and simple. And what is the persecution of Assange but some sort of revenge from a society that has, all of a sudden, woken up to the reality of the global internet? Not only is this cat out of the bag, but an identical cat is out of the bag in practically every country on earth. And as amusing as Sterling can be to listen to, if he thinks BlackNet didn't happen then he has to be high: BlackNet has practically swallowed the internet and it poops out free files all over the place. No doubt too there's all sorts of anonymous transactions flowing in there. Soon, the Pundits will be asking what diplomacy looks like in a world where big secrets can't be kept. -TD
Perhaps indicating a revival of a Red Scare initiative against Cyperhpunks in connection with promoting Wikileaks panic, three attacks have been published in recent days:
1. Bruce Sterling, 22 December 2010, opens with naming Tim May's writing on BlackNet and more:
http://www.webstock.org.nz/blog/2010/the-blast-shack/
2. Philip Pilkington, 21 December 2010, attacks Cryptome by recylcing a Readers Digest smear from 2005:
https://fixingtheeconomists.wordpress.com/2010/12/21/cryptome-org-weighing- in-on-the-debate-on-freedom-of-information/
3. Jaron Lanier, 20 December 2010, attacks Tim May, John Gilmore and others:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/the-hazards-of-nerd-s upremacy-the-case-of-wikileaks/68217/
If the Red Scare is duplicated more of this will likely come as the conspiracy net is spread to round up co-conspirators, fellow travellers, fronts like EFF, EPIC, ACLU, ProPublica and many more.
A long list of suspects here:
http://cryptome.org/0002/siss.htm
A shorter Wikileaks-related suspects and documentation here:
http://cryptome.org/0003/wikileaks-series.htm
As the campaign heats up it will include deep-pocketed funders, traitors planted inside security agencies, universities and corporations, squeezed informants against the ringleaders, congressional hearings, subpoenas, frightened
naming
of names, scouring of files for connecting dots at Archive.org, search engines, social media, mail lists, news lists, chat rooms, IMs, email, and the bountiful data collected by corporations, researchers, governments and their contractors who claimed they were merely studying the fantastic growth of empowering digital culture or more sinisterly, preparing to protect the people from anarchist enemies of centralized authoritatives.
Now this list predicted this reaction and described how to preposition defenses. Or was that just pretending overthrow of authoritatives?
Read the EFF and others' letter to Congress yesterday defending Wikileaks and compare it to similar actions in the 1930s-1950s protesting clamp down on the worldwide Red Menace. Then read Sterling, Pilkington and Lanier more closely. These smart guys know which way the wind is blowing and, as they write, they want no part in the insanity of taking freedom of information too literally. In short, punish Assange, Wikileaks and co-conspirators as a lesson to others that dissidence is "taken very seriously."