This should not be news to those who have followed the world of hackers -- religion and NGOs. They have been selling restricted information from the beginning of their enterprises. Some do it as employees and off-the-books agents of governments and business and individuals, some do it as rogue entrepreneurs like Wikileaks, or more commonly, investigative reporters, private eyes and holy workers -- and, ahem, high-minded scholars. It is an ancient industry, as old as human intercourse where cheating and hoodwinking and treachery are obligatory to survive against those who do the same. Nearly all who do it claim it to be necessary "because others do it," to protect our tribe, to protect our hordes of food, wealth, faith and means and methods of counterspying. And as ever, because we are superior and thus have the right to be worse than our imputed enemies -- mostly imaginary, often our own villainous agents plotting with others of their kind pretending to be enemies to keep their racket lucrative. Religious warfare had to be invented to excuse the slaughter of infidels. Messianism of Wikileaks is comical but it has worked multitudes for millennia with imaginary danger and protection. Do tithe. Kissinger and Giuliani and Chertoff and thousands of insiders -- call them ph d candidates -- go on to greater wealth outside, switching back and forth to keep the flim-flam flowing. All intelligence operations -- "knowledge industry" -- are illicit by design to exaggerate significance and risk, that way law (the most devious of all), mundane and heavenly, blesses them with powerful advertizing. They are all in cahoots. Wikileaks emulates an eternal business model, that is to lie and exaggerate about what it is doing. Every academic is familiar with these means and method, avid promoters of it, get some of that old time higher education, a certificate for excellence, a license to recruit and train newcomers, a pretense of opposition ie, high-level critique, ever plotting and dealing for perqs and advantages of salary, space, reputation, rank, and showtime. Selling classified information is what the knowledge industry was invented for. Now Wikileaks is a challenge to the highly organized operations of state, church, university, military, corporation, NGO (spit), media and unaffiliated (watch out for these cutthroat mercenaries alway betraying those stupid enough to outsource to the temps stealing the jewels). Assange stated at the beginning of Wikileaks it expected to make big bucks, $5M the first year he wrote on a private mail list -- among other pimping messages later published on Cryptome. The free stuff is meant lure volunteers and promote high-profile public service, lipsticked with risk, with the enterprise funded by selling costly material sold on the black market of worldwide spying in the tradition of public benefit ops, id, spies and ever more spies. No better customers for illicit information that those with depthless pockets. Soros and the Kochs have their lesser-known Internet promoters backing Wikileaks generously. And they expect good return on their investment, not just the freebies used to attact attention. Watch out for the public interest data miners of the Internet, and leakers and whistleblowers, bandits stealing data, marking it up with glamorous titles, ie deeply researched, classified, actionable, nation threatening, liberating, etc, reselling publicly thourgh gadzillion press operations and secretly through those who pretend to avoid limelight. Think Archive.org, think Wikipedia, think Google, think this list and your crafty mangy boil-ridden carcass. Mea culpa. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE