What this page is all about…
Yes, this is a bit off-topic on a website mostly devoted to photography…! 
But:
I think the Wikileaks story is one of the biggest game-changers in international politics that most of us have ever seen, or are likely to see (as far as we can tell just now). I have been ‘tweeting’ about this and writing about it on my Facebook page, but here I wanted to use my little corner of the internet to support Wikileaks and to make the information it is producing more easily available to others. The threats to our freedoms are very real, from governmental, media and corporate interests, as Simon Barrow has written: ‘This rapid gelling and solidarity of business and political interests is disturbing, revealing and unmistakable in its intensity and purpose – to try to clamp down on dissent and to bully and intimidate those involved in disclosing information which exposes corporate mendacity.’ I will not be updating this page regularly since there are many others who are doing that kind of thing. But read the information below, and download what you will. The list of mirror sites is at the bottom of this page.
9. January 2011
The USA’s Department of Justice subpoena to Twitter, wanting details for accounts held by Wikileaks activists and supporters is available for download here. You’ll see that the US government are pretty much following up details of anyone they’ve had contact with, and given that Google and Facebook (and Paypal and and and…) are likely to have received similar demands, if you’ve received messages from Wikileaks or donated to them at any point since 1.11.2009, you can be assured your details are with the US government too – but all that information will be in safe hands, don’t worry (ha ha ha!).
8. January 2011
There is a new official defence fund for Julian Assange that you can find here.
The pursuit of Wikileaks-related individuals by the Americans is intensifying, as indicated by demands for private Twitter communications, for example. Of course, as Wikileaks have pointed out, if the Iranians (or Chinese, or Russians , or…) had asked for private messages like this, the US State Department would describe this as a ‘violation of “Internet freedom”‘. A rather astute article in Foreign Policy has discussed the wider implications of such actions, including the likelihood of states seeking to create their own social networking sites that are not seen to be connected to the US government. Juan Cole has also written a thoughtful short comment piece about these issues.
As ever, Carne Ross, who has been commenting and ‘tweeting’ diligently about the Wikileaks story, is still worth reading on the wider issues raised.
7. December 2010
Julian Assange was arrested today on what appear to be trumped-up politicised charges involving minimal tangible evidence – I think it is pretty obvious Sweden has been ‘leaned on’ (in a few years’ time we might see “Cablegate 2″ showing US diplomatic efforts on this front!!). The wonderful Naomi Klein sent a very succinct Twitter message about all this today: ‘Few societies have defended their own ignorance as aggressively or as enthusiastically as ours.’
Wikileaks, as noted below, is under serious attack, but has planned for all kinds of eventualities, including harm coming to Julian Assange et al: you may not be aware that there is a so-called ‘insurance file’ available online (see also the end of this Q&A). This file is encrypted, and only those who created it know what it really contains. The decryption keys for this file are not available at the present time – and it is to be hoped they never become available, because that would mean someone has murdered or otherwise harmed Julian Assange or other key Wikileaks personnel. The file is available as a BitTorrent download from The Pirate Bay. I would urge you to download it (even though much of The Pirate Bay site is possibly illegal, I am sure that downloading this is no more illegal than the Guardian et al publishing the Wikileaks documents; note that you may have difficulty accessing The Pirate Bay from some employers’ networks – do it from home if you have a reasonable connection).
6. December 2010
Wikileaks says ‘we open governments’ – and that become ever more obviously necessary as the ‘Wikileaks story’ progresses! Following recent releases of information (esp. Afghanistan, Iraq, US embassy material), Wikileaks is under serious attack, and I would encourage support, for example, through financial donations or mirroring (mirroring is one way to ensure the information stays available, since as Joseph Menn writing for the Financial Times put it: ‘The internet was designed to withstand nuclear war, with no “single point of failure” that would cut communications.’). Given that most (western) governments, with the Americans in the lead, are spending their time explaining what is wrong with Wikileaks (and dangerous idiots like Palin are arguing for extra-judicial assassination – i.e. murder – of Julian Assange), rather than trying to address the grave disparity between the rhetoric of freedom and democracy with the evidence of encouragement of torture and dictatorial regimes, ‘opening governments’ has never been more important. Carne Ross, of Independent Diplomat, has argued cogently that the Wikileaks releases should change one thing for good: ‘governments must close the divide between what they say, and what they do’. Of course, for some that will be easier than for others!
With the help (much appreciated!) of someone who knows how to do these things, I have created space for a mirror of the Wikileaks site on my own webspace here (no data has been transferred there by Wikileaks at the time of writing) – I encourage you to do likewise if you can. (Note that I can only offer slow ftp access, not the sync application they prefer, and my tech friend advises me that this means they may not use my site).
Mirror sites
Even if my mirror offer is not taken up (I imagine they are inundated with offers!), at some point the main Wikileaks site may be forced off-line and it might become harder to identify the mirror sites. So here I am reproducing the list of current mirror sites, directly copied from the Wikileaks site; I’ll try and update this fairly regularly (yes, I know the formatting is a bit cranky, but I don’t have time to convert a table of 3 columns into one with 2 columns – I’ll only do that if the main Wikileaks site is closed down at some point). One or more of these links should always be working!
Wikileaks is currently mirrored on 1010 up-to-date sites (updated 2011-03-06 23:19 GMT)
Here is the mirror list sorted by apparent bandwidth
