Wiki realities

John Naughton wrote an important article in the Guardian yesterday, describing some of the challenges of balancing democracy and the freedom of the internet. It's going to be interesting to watch this slowly unfurl.

Naughton writes:

The political elites of western democracies have discovered that the internet can be a thorn not just in the side of authoritarian regimes, but in their sides too. It has been comical watching them and their agencies stomp about the net like maddened, half-blind giants trying to whack a mole. It has been deeply worrying to watch terrified internet companies – with the exception of Twitter, so far – bending to their will.

But politicians now face an agonising dilemma. The old, mole-whacking approach won't work. WikiLeaks does not depend only on web technology. Thousands of copies of those secret cables – and probably of much else besides – are out there, distributed by peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent. Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut down the internet. Over to them.

When is 'fair's fair'?

Wikilieaks' Julian Assange's recent warrant for arrest was announced on the BBC's website, along with news that the Swiss authorities have frozen the Wikileaks account "In a statement on its website, PostFinance said Mr Assange had "provided false information regarding his place of residence" during the account opening process."

It's good to know that after years of hiding stolen Nazi wealth that the Swiss Authorities have come to understand how to defend freedom.

What comes next? I suspect that it'll be some kind of crowd-funded response for wikileaks, with servers hosted somewhere off the global mainstream.