Best tone taken ever in a blog post.

posted by The Vidiot @ 8:58 AM Permalink

Xeni over at BoingBoing discussing the Pentagon's threat to shut down any leaking by Wikileaks:

LOL, as if! Did you backtrace it? That Washington Post op-ed by former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen is best read in Mad Dad Voice. Yes, this is the same nutball columnist who effectively argued for arresting or assassinating Wikileaks frontman Julian Assange a couple weeks ago (Raffi Khatchadourian's response in the New Yorker is a must-read).

There is no "off" switch for the internet in America. But even that reactionary fantasy misses a critical point: the encrypted "insurance" file which was posted earlier this month by Wikileaks pre-emptively negates any draconian, linear response that the state might consider: unlock the file with a key (or keys) that could easily be tweeted, emailed, or otherwise shared by Assange and colleagues, and the next Big Dump would be laid bare for all to read.

I'm not sure if Wikileaks is everything it's made out to be. I mean, Assange has come out called the 9/11 truth movement a bunch of nuts. And one can look at everything he's done as a clever, managed set of steps to first gain credibility then hand the government reason to do what it's always wanted to do which is shut down the 'net. He could just as easily be a government sponsored entity just as much as he's an annoying gadfly.

But the fact that the government is rattling that cage, or at least saying they can rattle that cage, is frightening. And now that most people I know get their faxes through an internet interface, well, even using the fax machines will be impossible.

Labels: internet, police state, wikileaks