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Tuesday, September 6, 2011
News WikiFinds: How you can help crack open the U.S. government
Posted By Rhiannon Fionn on Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 4:37 PM
You may have heard that there's been a little WikiLeaks drama going down, and that we've all been invited to dive in and swim around in it. Or, maybe you haven't heard.
Allow me to fill you in:
WikiLeaks, founded and headed by Julian Assange, got its hands on 251,287 diplomatic cables from the U.S. Government, supposedly, at least in part, from Pfc. Bradley Manning. He's the 23-year-old solider that's been in jail since May 2010 facing life in prison or even death, should he be found guilty. In addition to cables, Manning allegedly shared a video of our troops killing innocents in Iraq, which really pissed off our government. (Assange is under house in Great Britain arrest on unrelated charges.)
Originally, WikiLeaks' Assange shared the cables with a few international big-dog newspapers. However, purported personality conflicts, a disgruntled former employee (who allegedly destroyed leaked information from Charlotte's Bank of America) and a general sense of apathy on the part of the papers led to a bit of a slowdown in the leak flow.
Then, British newspaper journalist David Leigh of The Guardian rushed a book to print with an encryption key to the leaked cables listed as a sub-title of one chapter, effectively exposing the unredacted cables. Now, lawyers are involved and there's lots of finger-pointing and blame-gaming ... that deal is a hot mess.
Meanwhile, Assange effectively said, "What the fuck; why not?" and made the cables available last week to everyone with an Internet connection. Considering that governments around the world are doing their best to silence Assange and anyone else remotely like him, it was a pretty ballsy move.
The brouhaha: It's been claimed the leaked information could lead to huge international issues, and even expose some people around the world — those who are effectively outted in the cables — to unnecessary risks. So far, it's unclear if those claims are realistic.
Either way, Assange's move has captured the media's attention once again.
From the Associated Press:
With the information available to some people, Assange said he decided to make it available to everyone....
"We had a case where every intelligence agency has the material and the people who are mentioned do not have the material," he said from a mansion about two hours' drive from London, where he is under virtual house arrest pending extradition proceedings to Sweden on unrelated sexual assault allegations.
"So you have a race between the bad guys and the good guys and it was necessary for us to stand on the side of the good guys," he said.
Read the entire article, by David Rising, here.
This is where you come in ...
All you have to do is visit the database and type in the key word of your choice. Here's a link.
I've been poking around in the cables since they were released, and they are eye-opening. Sure, there's the stuff that will make you blink hard or laugh, like the U.S. Government comparing Anna Nicole Smith to a 'hurricane', the U.S. threatening Canada over their plans to legalize pot, the old Pope's phone number, revelations about the King of Saudi Arabia's tobacco and Viagra habits, the fact that Bilderberg groups do exist, etc.
But you start to recognize some major themes once you've been digging around in the cables for a while. For example: Our country loves to back its corporations, everyone everywhere is concerned about climate change (even if they're dragging their feet), and that, I'm sorry to say (though we knew this already), our country is a money-hungry bully.
I won't lie to you, sifting through the cables is very much like looking for a needle in a haystack, but even if you only search for hot topics, you'll learn a lot about our government and the world.
Don't stop with your search; share what you find.
The reason Assange is encouraging everyone to crowdsource a review of the cables is manyfold, I'm sure. There's the obvious: The old-school mainstream media can be supremely lame and slow. And there's the not-so-obvious: Releasing the cables is one hell of a way to empower, educate and connect people across every boundary imaginable.
Speaking of connecting, the twitterverse has a hashtag for WikiLeaks finds: #wlfind. Even if you're not on Twitter, you can follow the link and watch for important updates. If you are a twitterer, be sure to share your finds with the class, kids. Just tag it #wlfind.
Here's more on the WikiLeaks revolution, from RevolutionTruth.org:
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