/via crowdleak.net

"Operation: Leakspin" was renamed "CrowdLeak", which in my humble opinion is not such a good name for what it does. It surely does make it sound more respectable, but gives me totally wrong associations about what it does.

Anyways.. the idea behind it is just the right thing to do! The information that WikiLeaks publishes needs to be made accessible to as many people as possible - otherwise it is worthless information. And I'm not just talking about the technical side like mirroring WikiLeaks, I mean lowering any barrier to accessing the content. Diplomatic Cables are not necessarily a joy to read. "With the summarization, translation and publication of cables, we are able to reach the masses by using a method known as ‘crowd journalism.’"¹

So when OPLeakSpin on Twitter asked for CrowdSupport to make their website more easily accessible...

Crowdsupport: everybody please register the www.crowdleak.** domain (of your country) and set the (A) record to 72.10.53.98 #crowdjournalism

... I didn't hesitate too long and registered http://crowdleak.de and http://crowdleak.eu. I provide infrastructure, that's what I do. Other guerillas do other jobs and we all together make sense of CableGate for everyone. "The crowdsourced movement is grassroots. It is news created for, and by, you."²

Go Anonymous, go!!

TIME magazine chose Mark Zuckerberg as the person of the year 2010 over Julian Assange. What?!?! To quote myself in the moment I found out about that:

So why did Zuckerfag win @TIME man of the year with his walled garden, when there's #WikiLeaks fighting for the just side of the coin?

Yes, I can understand the choice and I still like it better than the Tea Party - that would have been taking the cake!!

Still I think this is a joke!
TIME magazine itself writes: "Zuckerberg and Assange are two sides of the same coin."
Well, let's have a look at what Zuck and Assange do with information and networking:

Zuck creates a system which is nice'n'shiny on the outside and on the inside it is a centralised instrument of power (yes, information is power). Facebook doesn't take it too seriously with human rights like free speech and does censor. We do know that meanwhile. All the half a billion people inserting their data into Facebook create a beautiful profile of their personality and even of the whole society. A profile "owned" by a few. Very probably one of the few is the CIA.

On the other side of the coin we have WikiLeaks. Which is being represented by Julian Assange, who faces the brunt of fighting for the age-old dream of hackers: making common information available for every human being. He might be an asshole and perhaps even a rapist, but he paved the way for people like Domscheit-Berg. These guys are working on providing people worldwide with the ability to voice their opinion without fear of prosecution and centralized censorship!

Hmm, wait... perhaps I can't laugh at all.. about the joke...

Anyways... in the end electing a "person" of the year is rather pointless nowadays. We should vote for concepts, systems or infrastructure. As otherwise in the long run Anonymous will be person of the year every year.

All the last days I was pretty sure that thanks to WikiLeaks it is obvious how the net works and governments just have to get it now. I was asking for media literacy and governments helping their people to acquire it! No, apparantly this is not how the world works. No one seems to get that decentralization is the way of making stuff work in the long run. That it is a bad idea to put things into a central repository controlled by a few.

When I started mirroring WikiLeaks not so long ago I thought of having a blog post "How to brace for impact as a finnish guerilla" and explaining to you that you should immediately start encrypting all your data to protect your freedom in increasingly hostile times for people raising their voice. But then I thought that it's not fair to project my paranoia onto you - believe me: paranoia is not a nice thing to have most of the time! ;)

Anyways.. I should have blogged that because a finnish guerilla needs to cultivate a bit of healthy paranoia that tells him/her/it: "Hey, there is some single point of control that can fail." And this also means failure as in censorship or other forms of restricting freedom of speech. French government just made a law that allows it to censor the internet³, WikiLeaks is known for having released an australian internet cesorship-list that has very questionable entries in it and german hackers are constantly fighting against implementing any centralized mechanisms of internet censorship, because they know that such things are too easy to misuse... so far they won.

And now the controllers and censors of this society again come sneaking through the backdoor. People! Learn using encryption!!
The german government tells us that end-to-end encryption is a bad idea⁴, because people are stupid. People won't get how encryption works. So instead of educating them and creating media literacy - the government just takes care of the complex encryption for their people. This way it can also decrypt all your mail and check it for viruses. This way they also build their backdoor to filter your mails.. just in case that you might be sending around digital information that they don't like.... Sanctity of the mail anyone?!?

To have real sanctity of the mail in the digital age you as a partisan have to be in control of your encryption and that only works when you use end-to-end encryption - don't let anyone tell you otherwise. A third party is rarely reliable and if you don't need it - why use it in the first place?! As an educative start to creating media literacy in the digital age, let me post this nice video here from the guys of Netzpolitik, who also get why being in control of your encryption is an essential thing for your freedom (not only of speech).

/via/

BTW: Giving your digital (and therefore endlessly copyable) lock away to the people communicating with you - yes, that's the right metaphor to explain asymmetric encryption! Why didn't I come up with this?!? ;P

If you can you should listen to the mix again, I posted earlier.. it really makes all this "freedom" around me feel not so serious. ;)

May I suggest to listen to this soundtrack while following the best cyberpunk thriller reality has ever written. You haven't heard of it? Go inform yourself: Google News Search for WikiLeaks :)