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Informartion war: U.S. government attempts to shut down Wikileaks
By siliconindia
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Monday, 13 December 2010, 15:50 IST
Everyone is aware of the battle between the whistleblowing website, Wikileaks and the U.S. government. With hackers supporting Wikileaks and corporate companies taking the side of the U.S. government, the era of Information war has begun.
In an attempt to protect its national security information, the U.S. government is bullying service providers to shut down the services of Wikileaks website on their network.The U.S. government is not able to digest the fact that no organization, company or pressure group has ever released this kind of information in this quantity.
The logic of this is quite worrying. All governments want to regulate the internet, but not a single one has ever found a way of doing it, with the possible exception of the Chinese.
The U.S. government shows frustration as it has lost its reputation through its activities and now it is not leaving a single stone unturned to shut down the website completely. Wikileaks is not the only website which pulls out scams and consipracies that the government is involved, the Guardian also takes such news like hot pan cakes and publishes it. Why is that only Wikileaks is targeted?
One of reasons that the U.S. government is seeing such a day is because they decided to centralise all their data and make it extremely accessible to everybody, on the basis that information sharing was needed after 9/11, and that approach has come back to bite them, because it's become very easy for one person at a fairly low level in their apparatus to expose nearly all their documents. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of how the technology works.
Freedom of expression is balanced against things like libel or racial hatred, and it should be down to courts to decide whose rights are being infringed. What is dangerous at the moment is the acceptance that it will be down to ISPs, or possibly the police, to decide where the line is drawn or, in the case of WikiLeaks, government officials in the U.S. deciding to ring around the relevant ISPs.
