Anyone who claims that Julian Assange has no plan is (net) deluded. Read this excellent piece by Aaron Bady that details Julian’s political theory. Whether or not you agree with his theory of conspiracy, there is a method to the “madness”. And this “madness” is about to trigger the proliferation of WMD’s, WikiLeaks of Mass Disruption. Get ready for the Clone Wars.
Why? Have a look at what happened to the music industry. As Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom wrote in “The Spider and the Starfish,” the biggest players with the best lawyers in the world went up against P2P file-sharing companies like Napster and Grokster. But as the labels were repeatedly winning lawsuits, “the overall problem of music piracy was getting worse and worse. It wasn’t that the labels weren’t vigilant enough. It was actually the exact opposite—the labels were adding fuel to the fire with every new lawsuit. The harder they fought, the stronger the opposition grew.”
When Napster was shut down, more decentralized P2P file-sharing sites began to spring up that became harder to eliminate, e.g., eDonkey, eMule, etc. The same will happen with Wikileaks. As the group becomes increasingly targeted, they will become more decentralized and will inevitably spawn “copy-cats”. And not just technology copy-cats, but legal-copy cats; as participants at NewsFoo repeatedly noted, WikiLeaks is a legal-hack, distributing servers across liberal democracies. (Meanwhile, by the way, the US government will become more centralized and closed).
Just yesterday I proposed a “Humanitarian Wikileaks” on Twitter and got numerous enthusiastic replies, DM’s and emails. And check out this site (OpenLeaks) still under construction (updated just 2 weeks ago), owned by CINIPAC Webhosting: Offshore, Secure, Anonymous.”
What’s going to happen next? Read these “8 Principles of Decentralization.” WikiLeaks is just the first generation. Future spin-off’s will become more specialized, sophisticated and will make fewer mistakes. Julian is often criticized for focusing primarily on the US. What people fail to understand is that all he has to do (and has done) is to trigger the Clone Wars to bring this disruption to many other shores.
On a personal note, I’m less worried by WikiLeaks than the actions that “open” democracies are taking to eliminate the initiative.
Updated: As is widely known, the US government and Amazon forced the wikileaks.org domain off the Web:
Here is WikiLeaks’ response:
See also: Former WikiLeaks Activists to Launch New Whistleblowing Site from the Spiegel Online and WikiLeaks: Moving Target by Renesys blog.
iRevolutions 
the internet is going all the way to omniscience, everybody able to know anything …
there is a “mystic” reason for this … the internet is just the out-picturing of the abilities of the conscious mind, and if you have ever been around anybody enlightened, you know the the ability of a developed mind to know anything is infinite.
Yep, you are right. Here’s what it says right now on: Wikileaks Mirrors
http://wikileaks.ch/mirrors.html
Wikileaks is currently under heavy attack.
In order to make it impossible to ever fully remove Wikileaks from the Internet, you will find below a list of mirrors of Wikileaks website and CableGate pages.
If you want to add your mirror to the list, see our Mass Mirroring Wikileaks page
Mirror List
The mirror list will be published when we will have at least 50 mirrors
FYI
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I think the “Humanitarian Wikileaks” idea is a great one. Data is still in silos and it’s a disservice to people on the ground. Here are my thoughts
Wikinomics of Leaks
Another excellent post, Patrick. I think you hit the nail on the head regarding the demonstration effect of Wikileaks. Governments will shudder when they realize this is only 1.o.
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