Wikileaks moved to cave bunker in Iran, Mr. Assange reportedly offered asylum by North Korea...

[Joe Greco]

> On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 10:05 PM, Ken Chase <ken at sizone.org> wrote:
> > All our topics of discussion are merging... (soon: "does
> > Wikileaks run on 208V?" :)
> 
> If they keep going that way, soon they will be running on nuclear
> power from the hidden centrifuges in some cave.

And just announced via Twitter ... no, just kidding.

However, the events here are troublesome.

On one hand, it's kind of predictable.  You have some things in the real
world, like the arrest alert and being placed on Interpol's "most wanted" 
for what appears to be not even a case of rape [*1], getting booted from
EC2 for "intellectual property" reasons (when the materials in question
are not and cannot be copyrighted), having their DNS service disrupted, 
etc.  Assange has irritated a large beast: the US Government.

On the other hand, this is the same government that has repeatedly fought
to reduce and minimize privacy laws, seen recently in cases such as the
GPS tracking fun out in the western states [*2].

None of that might seem relevant to netops, of course, but at some point,
we're going to see, and maybe already are seeing, deliberate interference
with the network in an effort to make the Internet work the way that the
US Government would prefer.

We've already seen some examples of this in seizures of domain names [*3],
an activity that would doubtlessly explode under COICA, etc., which at the
moment is probably the most vulnerable aspect of the Internet, but will 
this move on to more insidious things, such as redirection of or null 
routing of Wikileaks IP space "in response to a congressman's request",
while simultaneously waving a patriotic flag?  And at what point does that
stop?  Just for "big bad" things like Wikileaks?

We seem to be sailing into an interesting new set of challenges.  I'm not
sure that it'll be healthy for the net for the government to be providing
lists of IP addresses that have to be blocked; our routing tables are 
already quite challenged.

[*1] http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/sex-by-surprise-at-heart-of-julian-assange-criminal-probe/19741444
[*2] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/10/fbi-tracking-device/
[*3] http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/11/us-government-seizes-82-websites-draconian-future

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.

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