Friday, December 03, 2010

Wikileaks: The Empire Strikes Back

















3:30 AM EST. The Wikileaks site is down.

The WikiLeaks Twitter account (@WikiLeaks) took a while to respond to the outage, but finally spoke up, stating "WikiLeaks,org domain killed by US everydns.net after claimed mass attacks."

They say British police are going to arrest Julian Assange later today. For the crime of not wearing a condom.

Golly. And Interpol put out a RED ALERT. Somebody must really hate him.

The actually-existing structure and strategy of the American empire remains a near-total mystery to those who foot the bill and whose children fight its wars. And that is the way the elite of America's unelected permanent state, perhaps the most powerful class of people on Earth, like it.

Some folks ask, "Who elected Julian Assange?" The answer is nobody did, which is, ironically, why WikiLeaks is able to improve the quality of our democracy. Of course, those jealously protective of the privileges of unaccountable state power will tell us that people will die if we can read their email, but so what? Different people, maybe more people, will die if we can't.

Yup. That's why it's a war. That's why the  Empire is striking back. And that's why I agree with Digby.

My personal feeling is that any allegedly democratic government that is so hubristic that it will lie blatantly to the entire world in order to invade a country it has long wanted to invade probably needs a self-correcting mechanism. There are times when it's necessary that the powerful be shown that there are checks on its behavior, particularly when the systems normally designed to do that are breaking down. Now is one of those times.

They had it coming.

And besides, I've learned more in three days about what's really happening in this dangerous world, than I've learned in three years of reading or watching the MSM.

Gawd. Don't they know that the truth will set us free? The useful idiots.

The bad news? I'm afraid those who would keep us in the darkness of ignorance may use the Wikileaks furor as an excuse, to go after the internet.

To attempt to take a site like WikiLeaks down is to engage in a pointless game of whack-a-mole; no matter how many times you shut the site down, it will always pop up again elsewhere. And yet, WikiLeaks and sites like it do have another point of vulnerability, one that is increasingly being targeted by governments: their web addresses or urls.

The good news? We have been WARNED. So hopefully we won't let them take our freedoms away.

The even better news? Wikileaks is still alive. Somewhere.

The Coyote never caught the Road Runner.

Beep. Beep.

And neither did this guy...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Isn't it a big deal in the American press when China censors Google and other internet sites? "Oh those communists!"
We've gotten to the point where we're governed by hypocrisy.
It will be difficult to find truth when the days of open internet information sharing are gone.
I don't know what we'll do then...

Simon said...

hi anonymous...you're absolutely right. And now we know that China decided to censor Google after the spy chief googled his name and discovered some critical comments about him. Great eh? You know the Wikileak story is getting bigger every day. When it first started I though it was just a story about a really big whistle blowing operation.
But now I'm thinking the whole future of the internet is at stake. Scary stuff...