The implications of wikileak’s success: “

Almost a week ago there was a great buzz about a relatively new wiki, called wikileaks. One of the reasons for this popularity burst was, that this wiki accepts submissions that are

classified, censored or otherwise restricted […] of political, diplomatic or ethical significance. Wikileaks does not accept rumor, opinion or other kinds of first hand reporting or material that is already publicly available.

The emergence of a censorship issue about the content of wikileaks, boosted the wiki’s popularity even more. To summarize the story:

The case in San Francisco was brought by a Cayman Islands bank, Julius Baer Bank and Trust. In court papers, the bank said that ‘a disgruntled ex-employee who has engaged in a harassment and terror campaign’ provided stolen documents to Wikileaks in violation of a confidentiality agreement and banking laws.
According to Wikileaks, ‘the documents allegedly reveal secret Julius Baer trust structures used for asset hiding, money laundering and tax evasion.’ On Friday, Judge Jeffrey S. White of Federal District Court in San Francisco granted a permanent injunction ordering Dynadot, the site’s domain name registrar, to disable the Wikileaks.org domain name.

This case is not only interesting as one more censorship issue of the cyberspace but also as an example of the power and growth of the web. The indirect points that are raised are:

1. The decentralized nature of the web manages to overcome obstacles.
2. It seems that wikis are slowly evolving in authoritative resources.

Decentralization

The wikileaks domain was shut down, not allowing any users to visit the site. In any centralized network, shutting down the front door of a node would be enough to bring him down.
But the web’s decentralized nature, easily manages to overcome this issue. The wikileaks domain could be accessed

• by mirror sites across Europe [Wikileaks.be],
• the secure site of the wiki [http://wikileaks.cx/wiki/Wikileaks]
• and even by the sites IP Adress [http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks].

This proves the difficulty of local, real life laws to be applied in cyberspace. Internet has always been a self-organized place and efforts to control it haven’t brought any results until now.

Authority in Wikis

If we go back to December, we will find several discussions about the trustworthiness of wikis. The reason was Google’s announcement of their ‘unwiki’ platform Knol.

The fact alone, that this wiki received such attention speaks for the role of wikis in knowledge and information.
If wikis were really not trustworthy sources, which provide unproved data then why did this Bank step up against wikileaks?

It seems to me, that this case shows the strength of wikis, the power of the collective intelligence and the decreased role of authority and authorship.

The result

Latest news say that wikileaks got its domain back. Not because the Julius Baer Bank found the wiki less trustworthy and decided to drop the case, but because of the hard work and engagement of several lawyers and institutions (Public Citizen, the California First Amendment Coalition, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Project on Government Oversight, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation).

It seemed to be a lost case anyway.

Technorati Tags: Authorship, collective intelligence, wiki, wikileaks

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(Via social media and green horses.)

From ETech to Where 2.0: Disaster Tech and Activist Mapping: ”

At ETech last week, Ethan Zuckerman spoke about the use of web technologies in repressive regimes. It was great — one person even told that it was the best session he’d ever seen. I recommend reading Ethan’s write-up of his talk.

He began with the hypothesis:

Sufficiently usable read/write platforms will attract porn and activists.
If there’s no porn, the tool doesn’t work.
If there are no activists, it doesn’t work well.

The title of the talk was ‘The Cute Cat Theory of Activism‘. The more people use a service to post about cats the harder it is to shutdown entirely. So instead the authorities end up playing whack-a-mole. Ethan’s slide shows how some of the more popular services can be used:

Ethan told us real stories of Google Maps being used to track secret prisons and jets and of Twitter being used to organize protests.

At Where 2.0, we will be joined by Erik Hersman (AKA Hash). Erik founded the activist mapping site Ushahidi (trying to keep Kenya’s election safe). During his closing keynote, Enemies Around Every Corner: Mapping in an Activist World, he’s going to talk about the use of maps to report incidents and keep elections free. He’s going to explain the importance of clean data when people’s live are at stake and he’s going to share some success and failure stories with us.

At ETech, Jesse Robbins spoke about Disaster Tech. He spoke with Mikel Maron. I didn’t attend, but I heard great things about it afterwards. As they’ve both done real world work in this area (Jesse deployed to Katrina and is a firefighter; Mikel has been doing work over-seas) their words carry weight.

Jesse & Mikel’s model for framing the technology is very smart and easy to explain. My summary of it: ad-hoc use of tech will not work in all cases it needs a hero and it needs to be systematized — the search for Jim Grey got a lot of traction, Fosset’s search didn’t, but now there are sites to coordinate this type of work. Their slides are posted.

I hope that by including these talk at Where 2.0 (with an increased emphasis on geo and mapping) developers become aware of the disaster and activist usage patterns. Hopefully, with awareness new tools can be developed faster and more efficiently.

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(Via O’Reilly Radar.)

Biennale de dentelle / Lace biennale

Amanda Alessandrine posted a photo:

(Via Amanda Alessandrine’s Photos.)