If you follow this blog at all, you know I’m not one for enthusing about new activist campaigns and certainly not one to go around exhorting folks to donate to some cause or other. I tend to err on the side of (perhaps overly-cynical) aloofness: preferring to let campaigns and groups put some proof in the pudding before I serve it to my friends. And these past several years, the pudding served up by the organizations and actions opposing the warfare state has been pretty thin.
But WikiLeaks is the real thing, folks. It is taking bold, dangerous, big, deliberate steps to strike at the root of the problem. The best evidence of how they’re succeeding where so many have failed is in the frothing-at-the-mouth of the warfare states’ biggest offenders. (They ignored and ridiculed Cindy Sheehan and hoped she’d go away; they’re openly plotting the murder of Julian Assange.)
And Wikileaks could certainly use our help. As you may be aware, government authorities, throwing their weight around outside of ordinary legal channels, have been successfully pressuring companies providing internet service for WikiLeaks to cut them off. Because of this, for example, the wikileaks.org domain no longer works (you can still reach the site at other addresses, like wikileaks.de, and at the numerical IP address 213.251.145.96).
Amazon web services, a “cloud” service and storage provider, shamefully bowed to U.S. government pressure to stop hosting WikiLeaks data, and the U.S. has even forbidden many of its employees to view or link to the WikiLeaks-released diplomatic cables — to the extent of blocking the site to public web browsers at the Library of Congress. WikiLeaks computers are under a sustained distributed denial-of-service attack from enraged private and government entities. The Washington Times and others have publicly called for the assassination of WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange, and he is being sought on criminal charges that have all the fingerprints of a dirty trick.
While none of these things are going to be able to stop WikiLeaks from continuing to release the U.S. diplomatic cables that sparked all this retaliation (they’re too crafty for that), it gives you some idea of the strength and fury of the forces arrayed against them — forces that are determined to degrade the ability of WikiLeaks (or anyone else encouraged by their success) to pull off any similar feats in the future.
So I encourage you to put some skin in the game. There are several ways to donate money. You can also follow @wikileaks on Twitter, which can be a good way to stay informed about things you can do to help, which may include downloading data to your home computer so that WikiLeaks data is duplicated and widely-distrubuted so that it is less-vulnerable to attack. If you have the time and interest, you can also spend some time reading through some of the released cables, summarizing them and contrasting them with official government statements from the period.
But don’t sit this one out. Finally citizens and refuseniks have struck a major blow against the empire. You’re going to want to look back at this moment and remember being on the right side.
