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 internet¹, 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 idea², 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 :)

All this talk about the need to "assassinate Assange" ³ is pretty funny. Some little fascists going ballistic about realizing that their world view doesn't work in the digital age. Try to imagine how stupid they must be to not realize that what's happening is inevitable... that makes me smile, if not even laugh out loud. :D

It is a bit more scary that some of them manage to put big pressure on companies that cowardly refuse to do their job, like Amazon, PayPal and EveryDNS.

But having the library of congress block access to the WikiLeaks website⁴ - that is CENSORSHIP!! That is a government trying to construct the reality they need for themselves. A reality without these very real documents.

Sadly I'm not so "shocked to find countries such as France and the United States suddenly bringing their policies on freedom of expression into line with those of China."⁵ as the Reporters Without Borders put it.

You may have whichever opinion on Assange you like. And if you think he's acting like a narcisstic popstar, I wouldn't even disagree (actually I'd even start to argue about this being a good thing ;) ). But who cares in the first place? The information is out there, in digital form. It can be easily copied. It can be easily moved around the globe. It is impossible to make this information go away!

And a finnish guerilla gets angry, when brainless ruling idiots start restricting human rights just because they don't understand this! Time to get some tactics from the box of digital guerilla tricks. Yes, being a guerilla in the digital age means that YOU can fight in this war as well as Assange!

1. Spread the IP address of the WikiLeaks entry server: 88.80.13.160 (Reminds me of a former post, in which I told you to "Pursue me for I know something")
2. Provide DNS for WikiLeaks so that people don't have to remember the IP address. For Example you can reach WikiLeaks via http://wikileaks.amette.eu
3. Download insurance.aes256⁶

As the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says: "The first serious infowar is now engaged. The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops. #WikiLeaks" ⁷ Oh, and if you are looking for a christmas present for a loved one.. how about a nice USB-stick with insurance.aes256 on it? ;)

German weekly newspaper Die Zeit is bashing WikiLeaks all the time with some arguments that are far from truth or understanding. I once liked that paper and even wikipedia says that it is a liberal newpaper for intellectuals - yeah, you wish! And so far most of germany seems to be talking about how stupid our government looks in american eyes. Even some people I thought are smart don't get what WikiLeaks is about and #CableGate is demonstrating.

WTF?!? Of course I don't need an american diplomat to tell me that I'm ruled by brainless idiots - I know that already.

But I need WikiLeaks to make an american diplomat tell this honestly to the idiots that rule me. So when some politicians lament about world diplomacy never again being the same... YES! That's it! That's the point! I want the people deciding on how stuff is run around the world to be honest to each other, so that they can together find honest solutions. As Assange puts it: "WikiLeaks means it’s easier to run a good business and harder to run a bad business, and all CEOs should be encouraged by this." ⁸ Think of governments as 'businesses' and of honesty as being 'good' (you do agree with the last claim, don't you?).

So when I told you that I think this is brilliant..

Brilliant!! @USAgov admits being a bunch of assholes just because @WikiLeaks is gonna publish some truth. http://goo.gl/ikn7Y :D

...I was very serious about it. No pun intended. Probably due to the length of a tweet just too much of lossy compression for some. Verbose mode: Look! The US goes telling people what it does and how it works - and even before anything is being published by WikiLeaks! WikiLeaks works! It works! *clappinghandsinatotallyinfantileway*

"The point of Wikileaks — as Assange argues — is simply to make Wikileaks unnecessary." ⁹ "[..] if we maximize the reliable, verified information about how the world is working, then we start to produce more sophisticated and intelligent structures that respond to the abuses in societies and also the opportunities there may be in society."¹⁰

The more we make the ruling idiots think about what they say lie to each other and the people, the better the results of their work will become. They will have to start thinking about their real assignment and stop working only for their own profit, because the people start monitoring them. They can't play their own little conspiratory games in their circle of a few under the cover of being elected. They will be held accountable by the people - bottom up. Power to the people - executed, not abused, by a few. That's the democratic promise, isn't it?

And WikiLeaks is just about that. WikiLeaks works on making the ruling idiots realize that they can't hide anything in the digital age. It forces them to work honestly. Anything you say can come down on you - and if it affects millions or billions of people, then thanks to WikiLeaks it will come down on you one day! "You destroy the conspiracy, in other words, by making it so paranoid of itself that it can no longer conspire" ¹¹