Distributed power in the 21st century

The WikiLeaks Mirror Sites

Should information about the US government’s dealings with the rest of the world be free? A lot of European hackers and NGOs seem to think so — and let’s not forget all the people on the other sides of the globe who agree.

An excellent Google Earth dataset of the Wikileaks mirror sites has been developed by a guy named Laurence Muller, so you can see the 1344 places where the US Department of State cables were available when the map was made (1697 mirrors exist at the time of writing). The closure of the wikileaks.org domain name has done nothing to this network, nor to the originating site itself which is hosted at http://46.59.1.2. Of course this map does not show the undisclosed number of people holding the whole stash of US diplomatic cables, because after all, the point is to keep that information secret — until it goes public in an emergency, and is then mirrored by a similar network of hundreds of sites. Distributed information power is a reality in the 21st century.

Interestingly, a former WikiLeaks collaborator has announced a new project, openleaks.org, which is due to go online on Monday Dec. 13. This will only multiply the “whac-a-mole” situation confronting repressive governments who don’t know which unflattering mirror to shatter with their thugs and police. As the world slides into a deepening economic crisis, it seems that giant corporations and sovereign state apparatuses no longer hold all the cards.

As they say in France: At least we’ll know what sauce we’re going to be eaten with.

For details on the mirroring process see:

http://wikileaks.ch/mirrors.html

Download and unzip the Google Earth files to play around with the map:

http://www.multigesture.net/wp-content/plugins/download-monitor/download.php?id=33