Sharing in the era of asymmetric threats
Wikileaks editor Julian Assange showing the decrypted military video from Baghdad attacks July 2007. Photo by jenny8lee via flickr
Before launching into the diatribe, I thought I’d accomplish the inverse of what most blog posts do (including those found on this site) and make my point first.
- Go to Wikileaks’ Afghan War Diary page and download all 75 mb of the 91,000 leaked documents regarding U.S. activity in Afghanistan.
- Next up, download the slightly larger 1.4 GB creepily titled “Insurance file” whatever that is.
Now that we’ve got that sorted, what to do with it all? I don’t know what to say about the encrypted insurance file yet, no one knows what’s in it. Keep it, though. With the other one, well, have at it. do anything you want.
Be like the Guardian and mash it up in different ways and share how you did it. Crunch the data yourself and post it online. Save it on your hard drive somewhere in case different sites mirroring the information should for some mysterious reason come under attack. Burn it onto CDs and write “Dixie Chicks” on them in black marker. Copy them onto spare USB flash drives and leave them on busses, subways or any of your other preferred means of mass transit (In the UK some government agency workers do this by accident anyway) Make image files out of them and share them. Print them off and make wallpaper.
This is how the web works and it is an example of the web working.
A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider to be God-fearing and pious.
